Adventures in web-land (6)

Sadly not a great deal of progress this weekend. I had planned to work on adding the webmentions and semantic linkback plugins, but illness has forced a day in bed today.

As ever, help has been forthcoming from those further down the Indieweb road.

After adding my various internet presences to my WordPress blog, and vice versa, I ran my site through Indiewebify.me to see how I was doing. Only my GitHub and Twitter accounts tracked back and got me a tick in the box, as it were. I checked my syntax, but nothing changed. Oh, I got "verified" on micro.blog but that doesn't track back, either. I left things, there, feeling a little discouraged. It turns out that pretty much only Twitter and GitHub do actually return the favour. So if you don't have an account on one of those two services you fail step 1? I couldn't find anything in the Indieweb documentation that explained this. The answer came from the Indiewebcamp Slack. Still, at least that exists!

I set the iOS Microblog app to post to my WordPress site rather than to my Microblog hosted site. It posted perfectly: a status post with no title. Unfortunately, when the RSS feed got sent back to Micro.blog it arrived as a post number and a link. Not what I intended at all. It would appear that the indieweb-compatible SemPress theme inserts the post number: it's visible in the WordPress admin panel. It doesn't display on the published site, but somehow it's there.

I have been given some code to insert which will strip out titles on status posts from the RSS feed - when I'm at a computer that will be something I try next. This needs to be a toggle in the theme, if it's going to be easy to understand for the average person.

From my recent experience it seems there is a need for a fully compatible WordPress theme. Or maybe I shouldn't have opted to go with WordPress. I really felt that this was a happy halfway house, though. I'm not about to run my own server, nor do I have the skills required to run other blogging software on my Dreamhost space.

Onwards and upwards.