It appears to be necessary to wean my sites off Jetpack, and eventually all Automattic products. I don’t have the time to investigate Ghost right now, but I am working on reducing the Jetpack features that I use. Having closed my Tumblr account, and with Farcebook and Xitter no longer allowing remote posting, the only thing I was using the Social module for was Mastodon. As of today. I’ve stopped doing that and have installed the ActivityPub plugin instead. Hence a testing post.

Now if only it was possible to stop using Microsoft products as well… Yes, yes, I know, but I still have to work, and clients expect me to use Microsoft.

Update: Well that’s annoying. Apparently ActivityPub doesn’t play well with W3 Total Cache. So for now I’ll have to manually cross-post to Mastodon as I’ve been doing to BlueSky. Not that I blog that often here these days, so it is not much of a pain.

Back in the day, Feedburner was a useful way for people to stay up to date with blogs. That was before Google effectivly killed off RSS. But it isn’t gone. Websites still pump out feeds, and slowly the infrastructure around them is returning.

Meanwhile the WordPress plugins that used to enable people to subscribe to FeedBurner have all gone. I have a dead plugin that I need to get rid of as it might be a security risk. But I have some 30 people still apparently subscribed to this blog via Feedburner. If you are still out there (and not just dead email addresses), I don’t want to lose you.

What I have done is sign up to a new RSS service called Follow.It. You can subscribe to my feed there. It looks to be somewhat more flexible that FeedBurner, which is nice. But I now need to close the Feedburner account for this site. I’d like to make sure I don’t lose the existing subscribers. I have all of your emails so I can transfer you over. If one of those people is you, please get in touch so I can check that the transfer has gone OK.

No, not me, the blog.

As you have presumably noticed, there’s a new theme in place here. This wasn’t planned. Some very old themes don’t support mutliple screen sizes very well. In particular they tend to be designed for PCs rather than tablets or phones. Modern themes are designed with portability in mind. Now you can get clever stuff that will adjust your theme for mobile devices (in the Jetpack plugin, WordPress veterans), but that is being retired this year.

There are a lot of sites that I manage, and many of them use a themes that are up to 10 years old and which need an update. Also many of them are text-heavy, and most modern blog themese assume that every post will have an associated image. So finding a replacement theme that a) works on a text-heavy site; b) is free; and c) isn’t likely to become unsupported in a year or two; will not be easy.

This theme is Penscratch which looks specifically designed for a text-heavy site. It is also created by Automattic who own WordPress so it is likely to stick around for a while.

The header image is from Pixabay. It has cats and books, which seems kind of appropriate.

I will probably fiddle with the look of the thing for a while yet. In the meantime if you spot anything that is not working in the theme (not broken links, there are bound to be lots of those) then please let me know.

Sorry folks, seems like I was wrong about how Jetpack generates the menu for the mobile theme. It doesn’t use the inbuilt WordPress menu. It does it by finding all of the public pages you have, whether they are linked into your site’s navigation system or not. This is a VERY BAD THING. Consequently I’m disabling the Jetpack mobile theme and goning back to WPtouch.

Some of you may have noticed the additional share buttons on this blog. That’s part of my experimenting with Jetpack, the official WordPress plugin that is seeking to supplant many commonly used independent plugins.

My initial experiences are fairly positive. Jetpack has replaced three existing plugins I was using. Automatic export to Twitter and Facebook now work, though Jetpack doesn’t do Google+ and is less good at Facebook than HootSuite so there’s room for improvement. It also has a better mobile interface than WPtouch, which is mainly because it takes advantage of the new menu system in WordPress (that won’t happen if you have an old theme that doesn’t support menus). There are other aspects to Jetpack that I still have to test and which look interesting.

Part of me worries that, once most of the independent plugin people have gone out of business, we’ll suddenly find we have to pay $50/month to carry on using Jetpack, but then plugin compatibility has been a nightmare for a while now so it is good to have it simplified.

As if by magic, Automattic, the people who own WordPress, have suddenly announced an upgrade to one of their plugins that includes export to Twitter. I shall give it a try and see if my site is suddenly OK again.

I should note in passing that the more people use WordPress, the more important it becomes that plugins be reliable and regularly upgraded. I’m not surprise that Automattic want to take over many of the more popular plugin features themselves. It will probably be good for their ecosystem in the long run. But if I were a successful plugin writer I’d be a bit peeved.

I see from LiveJournal that a mass panic is going on following a substantial numbers of layoffs at the LJ offices in San Francisco. Personally I can’t see LJ going away. They still have their Russian operation, which is the head office, but I guess they may be less responsive to English-language customers in future.

Anyway, if you are looking for a new place to blog, one of the easiest options is to sign up at WordPress.com. You’ll get a free blog with vastly more functionality than LJ, and better free themes as well. The free blogs do have some ads, and a wordpress.com address, but if those things irk you then there are premium account features available. Alternatively, if you are web-savvy and already have a site of your own, you can download the software for free and manage your own blog.

I’ve been using WordPress for several years, and I’m very happy with it. If you have any questions about it, please ask.

So, because I am an incurable geek, I now have my latest tweets showing up in the sidebar on this blog, and I can generate a tweet every time I make a blog entry. I haven’t yet turned on the tweet digest in the blog feature because it is still apparently experimental, but I might do if the twittery stuff turns out to be fun. All this good stuff is courtesy of Alex King who is something of a WordPress guru.

Now I get to find out what the notification tweets look like…

It seems that having a WordPress blog is becoming quite popular. Some chap from London called Gordon Brown has just launched one. He has named it after his house. Apparently he’s quite big in UK politics, which is odd because the site is full of stuff from YouTube, Flickr and Twitter. Anyone would think that Tony Blair was still in charge (although he’d probably be using Facebook instread).