Category Archives: meta

Is this thing on?

This is a test of a plugin that links #WordPress with #GNUSocial.  This post originated on my WordPress blog at alfter.us/wp and should show up on my new GNU Social node, Woofer, at woofer.alfter.us (and at my followers’ nodes).  Replies on the GNU Social side should find their way back to WordPress.

The existing linkage to Google+ and Farcebook remains unchanged, but those are mostly one-way.  (WordPress is set up to pull posts from Farcebook, but it doesn’t check for replies.  It also has an annoying tendency to pull from Farcebook posts that originated on the blog.)

This should work…and a cautionary tale

I think what was happening was that the Relative Image URLs WordPress plugin caused breakage that Farcebook didn’t know how to handle. I recently made HTTPS mandatory for alfter.us, but I don’t think the Relative Image URLs plugin was stripping off enough. The URL for the image below is https://alfter.us/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/apple_iie_larger.jpg (used to be http://alfter.us/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/apple_iie_larger.jpg). It should’ve been trimmed to /wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/apple_iie_larger.jpg, but it appears the plugin only trims off the protocol at the beginning (http: or https:).

I’ve disabled the plugin. There should be a photo of an Apple IIe attached to this post.  If this ends up working, consider this a warning to not use the Relative Image URLs plugin if you want all of your blog posts to show up on Farcebook. (Google+, by comparison, was not affected.)

apple_iie_larger

HTTPS is now mandatory at alfter.us

All communication with alfter.us is now encrypted.  Unencrypted requests are 301-redirected to the equivalent encrypted request.  Any saved links will still work; they’ll silently be redirected to their new destination.

WordPress 4.0 is out

I checked for updates this morning and found a new version waiting…decided to give it a shot.  Hopefully it didn’t break anything. (Mainly I need to verify that Farcebook and Google+ are still getting new posts. They are.)

Website and Facebook posts imported into WordPress

The contents of my website are all imported into WordPress now. 301 (“moved permanently”) redirects have been set up in Apache to route old links to the new locations.

I’ve also imported Facebook posts into WordPress, going back to 2009.  Going forward, stuff I post here gets automatically copied to both Facebook and Google+.  Also, if I slip up and post something directly to Facebook, WordPress should get a copy of it.

I’m using a self-hosted WordPress instance, not wordpress.com or someone else’s hosted WordPress. This means I should have everything I’ve posted through the years on a server I control. You might want to bookmark http://alfter.us/.