If you’re seeing this then the migration is done! The weblog has moved from weblog.antranigv.am to antranigv.am.
I have also spent some time updating my About page, I hope I haven’t missed anything important. I will be adding more pages soon, such as link to friends, blogs that I read, what I use, etc.
I hope ActivityPub is working properly with the new domain.
Long Live The Web!
I just learned that the WordPress mobile app supports non-block classical editor. Wow this is a life saver! Now I can blog on the move without opening my laptop or mobile browser!
WordPress.com owner Automattic acquires an ActivityPub plugin so blogs can join the Fediverse
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr and other web publishing tools, is the new owner of the ActivityPub for WordPress plugin and has also recruited its developer to come work for the company, according to Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg.
This makes me very happy! I’ve been using that plugin for a while now. As a matter of fact, that plugin was the main reason why I moved to WordPress.
The newly acquired plugin allows WordPress.org and WordPress.com blog owners to reach readers on federated platforms, like the Twitter rival Mastodon and others.
I absolutely hate that people are calling Mastodon a rival of Twitter. Mastodon (and the decentralized web) is not a rival to anything. It’s like saying that Coca-Cola’s rival is… water. Nope, Coca-Cola’s rival is Pepsi, Twitter’s rival is <insert a corporate and centralized social media here>, but not ActivityPub based networks.
The Internet is going back to its roots, and I am loving it!
I don’t remember the first bookmarklet that I’ve used, but as far as I can tell, I’ve never stopped using them.
One of the nicest things of WordPress on iOS is that I can use 3D touch to write a post instantly.
Yet, somehow, I’ve been using a typical bookmark on my computer. So I’d click on the bookmark, which would open my WordPress instance, then I’d click on Add New Post.
Even if I had the Add New Post page bookmarked, it would be “somewhere” on my screen.
But with a bookmarklet, I can make it a popup, which usually would center, and there would be no distractions as well. Just content.
I’ve been running my own instance of Lobsters for a while (at letstalk.netter.am) and one of the niceties is Lobsters’ bookmarklet to submit links.
I realized that I should use a bookmarklet for writing posts as well.
So here it goes.
javascript:{window.open("https://your.wordpress.blog/wp-admin/post-new.php", "NewPost", "popup");void(0)}And just like that, I can write a new post instantly, as I did right now 🙂
Technically, the first argument can be any URL that you wanna have front and center. Hope this helps you to write/blog/tweet more.
That’s all folks…
Our story starts 2-3 weeks ago, when my younger sister asked me to open a blog for her (it runs in the family, I think). Like any sane person, I created a FreeBSD Jail, configured its networking and followed an online article on how to deploy WordPress on FreeBSD. That’s the proper way to do it, right?
And I fell in love! Last time I used WordPress was in 2018, but this time it felt different, I’m not sure why (yet), but it feels like it came back to its roots. It has a simple screen that helps you to write.
Usually, I would say that tools don’t matter, and yet, I (narcissistically) rant about tools and that Docker is awful FreeBSD Jails is amazing. But I think that tools matters, they always mattered, it’s just that, we say such things in order to not sound like gatekeepers to newcomers.
Next was my girlfriend Lilith, she migrated from Blogspot to WordPress, she also blogged about that. Also deployed in a FreeBSD Jail in my home server.
Before making such decisions I look at data, so I downloaded my posts and did Unix magic.
$ xmlstarlet select -t -v '/ul/li/span' posts.txt | cut -d ' ' -f 3 | sort | uniq -c | sort
2 2017
2 2019
3 2018
7 2020
14 2022
29 2016
35 2014
47 2021
90 2015This comes from my Armenian blog, where I used to have WordPress, and yes, during 2015 I was very busy AND I used WordPress.
My Armenian blog is my “lab”, so I moved it not only to WordPress, but to a whole new domain, a Unicode domain with a Unicode TLD, անդրանիկ.հայ.
My English blog used to live at https://antranigv.am/weblog_en/, so I migrated it to a new subdomain, weblog.antranigv.am.
Migrating from Hugo to WordPress is not what I want to talk about, that’s a story for another day and that day is tomorrow!
I did some basic things on WordPress, such as disabling comments, which incidentally Rubenerd just blogged about and I added “Reply via email” as noted in Kev’s blog.
Oh and I added a plugin that publishes all the articles to ActivityPub, now you can follow @antranigv@weblog.antranigv.am from Fediverse (e.g. Mastodon, Pleroma, etc).
In the first week I blogged more on my Armenian blog than I did in months.
Expect a flood of posts (well, not really, more like 2-3 posts a day).
That’s all folks…