Category: Tech

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I’ve been using the excellent ActivityPub Plugin for WordPress to connect this blog to the Fediverse for several years now, and it keeps getting better. The plugin makes any WordPress blog also work like a Mastodon server, so you can follow and interact from any site running Mastodon, Akkoma, Pixelfed (image posts only, of course), Snac or my favorite, GoToSocial.

Last year some features started breaking on here as WordPress and ClassicPress diverged, and I put some stop-gap fixes in place. I never quite got around to debugging it in my spare time, though. So I was very happy to see that starting with the 7.8.3 release a couple of weeks back, ActivityPub for WordPress now explicitly checks for ClassicPress to fall back to a compatibility mode!

You still need to trick it into thinking it’s on WordPress 6.5 or later (ClassicPress 2 split off from WordPress 6.2), but the latest version fixes all the problems I’d been working around on this site, including broken comment forms and missing images on the Fediverse view of a post.

Update: I missed a scenario with filtering comment authors in comment_reply_link. I’ve manually worked around it for the moment, and when I have a chance I’ll either do a proper bug report or suggest a proper fix.

So I’d like to give a shout-out to Matthias Pfefferle and the ActivityPub Plugin team and say: thanks for fixing it!

And if anyone reading this wants to connect their WordPress or ClassicPress site directly to the Fediverse (rather than just cross-posting or auto-posting links), this plugin is still the best way to do it.

On a related note…

I finally got around to fixing Share Classicly so it won’t add its link to the Fediverse view of a post. (Aside from cutting the clutter, boosting would make more sense anyway.) That’s the plugin I made that adds a ShareOpenly link to each post, so your readers can share to a Micropub, Mastodon, Bluesky, etc. account.

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In retrospect, it’s wild that so many tech people who were hyper-aware of the fact that Microsoft’s dominance in the 1990s and 2000s was due to more to marketing (“never underestimate Microsoft on marketing”) than technical merits…fell for the idea that a “marketplace of ideas” would coalesce around the best ideas, and not just the loudest ones.

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I can go with your scifi/fantasy story’s super-impossible thing being associated with an eclipse. It’s activating or deactivating people’s super-powers? Sure! Certain magic spells can only be cast during an eclipse? Sure! The moon transforms into cheese? OK, whatever. (pun not intended)

But please, please get the basic mechanics right! Continue reading →

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I really wish GNOME’s “Oh No! Something went wrong!” screen would let me restart just the crashed components instead of forcing me to log out completely. Or let me decide if I’m willing to continue without whatever crashed. If the audio broke, and I’m not doing anything that needs sound right now, it shouldn’t block me! — just like if the extension I’m

Heck, I’d even settle for just being able to interact with the applications that are still running. I can see them on the overview, and the thumbnails still update! Fortunately I haven’t had it happen while I was editing something, but I’d sure like to be able to click on “save” if I need to!

When I first started using Linux, it was a lot less stable than it is today, but when something broke, I always felt like I could fix it. Even if a window manager crashed, I could relaunch it and pick up where I left off.

I keep coming back to GNOME, but it has an infurating tendency to weld the hood shut on things that “just work” most of the time, because you should never need to fix that issue! (See also: Geary not offering manual sync, GNOME Software wanting to reboot the system when you update Firefox, etc.)

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Automattic has announced that they are “realigning” their contributions to WordPress due to fending off “attacks” from the “community” and WP-Engine.

Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Members of the “community” have said that working on these sorts of things should count as a contribution to WordPress.

In the interest of, as you put it, “secur[ing] the future of WordPress for generations to come,” I trust you’ll be releasing the WordPress trademark, core project management and the infrastructure at WordPress.org, (the latter of which which CEO Matt Mullenweg has repeatedly pointed out that he owns personally) over to the community so you can “focus on for-profit projects within Automattic” without the distraction of the wider WordPress ecosystem.

Either that, or you’ve just told the entire WordPress community — excuse me, “community,” I forgot to include the scare quotes you so meticulously included throughout your article — that we should never trust you to have the community’s interests at heart, only your own.

I suppose this means I should start looking for alternatives to the handful of Automattic-built plugins I’m still using, as it sounds like I shouldn’t anticipate them continuing to be maintained.

Update January 10: It gets worse. Mullenweg just deactivated the accounts of several high-profile people at WordPress-adjacent companies who dared to question his leadership, in a post that goes increasingly off the rails.

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Back in 2002, I set up this blog on b2. A year later, b2 updates had stagnated, I migrated it to a fork of b2 called WordPress.

In the intervening 21 years, WordPress has gone on to power a huge fraction of the web. But in my opinion the project has lost its way, starting with the move to the Gutenberg block editor in 2018 and trying to become everything to everyone instead of just really good blogging software.

In response to the Block Editor merge, another project forked WordPress to create ClassicPress. Initially it was more or less WordPress Minus Gutenberg, but they’ve continued to do their own development as well, from cleaning up old complex code to improving the way media management works. I sorta kept up with it for a while, but finally decided to really evaluate it this month, and it’s actually really good! So I migrated a couple of test blogs, then Katie’s Feral Tomatoes.

Then I started looking at what it would take to migrate this 22-year-old, 3,255-post behemoth of a blog. (And that’s after moving a bunch of posts to other parts of my site, and deleting a bunch of no-longer-useful posts like ‘Migrated from 1.1 to 1.2. Let me know what’s broken.” or “Check out this weird link!” with no commentary (especially when the weird link is long-dead by now anyway).

Continue reading →

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Today I found myself thinking of Terminator 3, specifically the plotline in which all kinds of random computer crashes are spreading across the internet.

For obvious reasons.

In today’s real world incident, it’s a bug in an auto-pushed update for widely-used security software by CrowdStrike, ironically used to protect mission-critical systems. In the two-decade-old movie (pardon me while I turn to dust), it’s Skynet spreading itself across the internet.

At the time, I thought the nuclear strike would wipe out a lot of internet infrastructure, destroying major nodes and leaving pieces of Skynet disconnected from each other. A commenter remarked that he’d been doing research for a novel and experts agreed that enough of the major nodes and infrastructure would survive the attack to keep the network functioning.

The interesting thing: Neither of us had heard the story that ARPANET (the internet’s predecessor) had been designed for that scenario. These days, it’s pretty much repeated as gospel… but apparently it wasn’t a design goal, and the idea that it was can be traced back to a 1991 article in Network World magazine that conflated ARPANET with a different network design, which was never actually built. (via)

From there it took on a life of its own for the same reason many urban legends (and conspiracy theories) do: it made a better story.

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