Monthly Archives: October 2022

Tweaking a WordPress blog for the fediverse

The Fediverse is taking off. Slightly. Not sure yet whether it’s similar to “Linux on Desktop” but no matter what it’s all about federation. And making it easier to get content right into the timeline of people is worth investigating.

So I decided to try the ActivityPub plugin and see where it leads me.

Installation of the plugin is straight forward. Head to “new Plugins”, search for ActivityPub, install and activate it.

The cool thing is: That’s it!

At least when you have setup your WordPress blog out of the box.

You can now follow the author on the fediverse by checking for @[authorname]@[blog-URI] . So in my case that would be @heiglandreas@andreas.heigl.org

And of course in my case it didn’t work out-of-the-box. Why should it.

Why? Well: Two reasons:

  • One was that I use the Yoast SEO plugin which by default (or did I actually set it up that way?) did redirect requests to the author-page back to the main website. Which is kind of counter productive when you want information about the author. So I changed those settings (“Yoast SEO” => “Search Appearances” => “Archives” – Set “Author Archives” to On)
  • The other was that I am running this blog from a subfolder. Which is something so common, that the plugin authors already have that in their FAQ on the plugin page. So I headed over to the server-config, made the mentioned tweaks, restarted the server and – voila – everything works!

Now I was able to find and follow @heiglandreas in my Mastodon-Client.

Things that I need to figure out now

The next things on my todo-list are:

  • That’s all nice and dandy on a personal blog. But how do I implement this so that people can actually follow a blog with changing authors – like for example 24daysindecember (did I mention that we are looking for people that want to contribute?)
  • Is there a possibility (or does it at all make sense) to somehow integrate that into my default fediverse-account? Or to get my personal account over to the andreas.heigl.org domain? Or to setup an @andreas@heigl.org fediverse account that also contains the stuff from the blog…

But those are questions that I will possibly answer in a