Category: WordPress

WordPress

May 01

43% of the Web Can No Longer (Easily) Auto-Share to Twitter

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As of today, May 1, 2023, 43% of web sites will no longer be able to easily auto-share posts to Twitter. I’m referring, of course, to WordPress, which W3Techs shows as powering around 43% of all sites they scan.

Due to the continued incomprehensible decisions being made by Twitter’s new management, the company behind WordPress, Automattic, has stated that they have discontinued the easy auto-sharing of posts through their hosted WordPress.com service, and also through the Jetpack Social service used by many people (myself included) who operate their own WordPress instances.

The issue is that Twitter decided to start charging for API access, and as Automattic notes:

The cost increase is prohibitive for us to absorb without passing a significant price increase along to you, and we don’t see that as an option. We have attempted to negotiate a path forward, but haven’t been able to reach an agreement in time for Twitter’s May 1 cutoff. 

When you publish a new post on WordPress.com or any WordPress site using Jetpack, it will no longer be automatically shared out to Twitter. You can, of course, manually copy and paste the URL from your site over into Twitter. And you can potentially use some other auto-sharing plugin that has decided to pay Twitter’s API fees. 

Now of course all 43% of web sites using WordPress did NOT use this auto-sharing capability. Many sites did not, but many did - and this allowed Twitter to be the place where you could be notified when someone you followed published something new.

Of all the many ridiculous decisions Twitter’s management has made in the past six months, this excessive changing for API access seems to me to be one of the MOST short-sighted decisions.

One of the reasons I used Twitter was to get the latest news and content. Now Twitter is reducing the amount of content that will be shared.  The API limits are expected to affect public service announcements - and now will affect the sharing of blog posts.

I get that Twitter’s new owners desperately need to figure out ways to make money, but this doesn’t seem to be the right one.

In my mind, if you want your social service to be THE place for people to go for the latest news and content, then you want to reduce any friction involved with posting content INTO your service. 

The reality is that you (Twitter) need that content far more than the content providers need you!

The Good News

There was some good news in the post from Automattic - specifically that they will soon be adding Mastodon auto-sharing, as well as Instagram:

However, we’re adding Instagram and Mastodon very soon. In the meantime, auto-sharing to Tumblr, Facebook, and LinkedIn still works as expected

I don’t personally care as much about the IG linkage, but the Mastodon auto-sharing will be hugely helpful, as that is where I am spending most of my social time these days. There are no API fees there, and content can be shared in many ways. 

You can already do this auto-sharing to Mastodon using ActivityPub plugins, but this announcement indicates it will be brought more into the main WordPress / Jetpack functionality, which will make it that much easier for people to use.

I look forward to trying the Mastodon sharing out when it becomes available!

Meanwhile… this announcement means there are even fewer reasons for me to be checking Twitter anymore. Sad to see the continued decline. 🙁

 

Dec 22

Automattic Promotes WordPress.com as a Platform for Email Newsletters (and provides improved support)

Screenshot of WordPress.com's page about setting up a newsletter, with the heading "Sign in. Set up. Send out."

Just as Twitter is killing off it’s Revue newsletter service, Automattic is promoting their hosted WordPress.com service for newsletters - and providing some new tools to make that easier. In their announcement blog post, they note that WordPress.com has already had the features to email posts out automatically. This “newsletter” functionality has been there for quite some time. What they’ve done now, though, is to bring those newsletter features together in a new theme - and they’ve also simplified the process of setting up a newsletter site.

[NOTE - this feature is part of the WordPress.*COM* hosted service, not part of the WordPress software (sometimes referred to as "WordPress.ORG”) that you can install on your own servers. However, they indicate that the theme used for this newsletter feature will be made more widely available in the future.]

In the announcement, they mention these features:

  •     Add unlimited email subscribers
  •     Import subscribers from other platforms
  •     Launch with a beautiful, ready-made theme or customize every detail with a myriad of Block Patterns 
  •     Stylize your newsletter with a background image, site icon, and accent color 
  •     Schedule email publishing
  •     Monetize your site (stay tuned for more paid subscription features)
  •     Use a free .blog subdomain or connect a custom domain with one of our paid plans
  •     Publish on the go with Post by Email – making writing a newsletter as simple as sending an email

They also mention that you can start up a new newsletter or add the features to an existing hosted blog.

Giving It A Try

Naturally, I had to try it out. 😀 I started by going to the newsletter page and simply choosing the link “Start building your newsletter”. I logged in with my existing WordPress.com account and was brought to a page to set up my newsletter:

Wp set up newsletter screen

This was simple and easy. After I took the screenshot I added a logo, which needed to be circular. 

Here is one place Automattic will monetize - the “Favorite color” allowed me to use blue for free. Several other colors are available as part of a premium upgrade.

Next they prompt you to set up a custom domain, and offer you some options while allowing for more. You can, of course, skip this (I did in my test) and just use the free default domain they give you.

screenshot of a screen where you can choose a domain to use with your new site.

As I noted, I skipped this part and just moved on to the new screen where I was asked to choose a plan - or start with a free plan.

screenshot of a screen labeled "choose a plan" with sections for the Personal plan at $4 per month and the Premium plan at $8 per month

I chose for the moment to stick with the free plan for this test. After clicking that link, I had one more screen where I could add some initial email addresses and then… ta da… I was at a screen to start publishing

screen shot of a WordPress editor screen and the works "You're all set to start publishing"

 

What Do I Think?

First, to be clear, there is not really any dramatically new functionality here. This is how WordPress has worked for quite some time. Even the field for someone to subscribe has been there as part of the “Subscribe Block”.

All that’s really new is this “Newsletter” theme and some of the onboarding screens.

Having said that… I think it can be a great way to get started with a newsletter!

You have all the power of WordPress editing. You can run it on your own domain. You can use it on your laptop or mobile device.

It’s WordPress!

Now, it’s not clear to me that you will get the kind of statistics that you will get from a Substack, Revue or other newsletter platform. I couldn’t see any way to find, for instance, the open rate, or to know how many people clicked which links. Maybe it’s there and I’ve just missed it. Or maybe there is the expectation that you might use Google Analytics for that as part of a paid plan.

I don’t know… and it doesn’t really matter for me, personally. But I could see people who want to use this as a newsletter platform wanting that kind of information.

My one criticism was with the information about the plans. I couldn’t find any easy matrix showing what I get on the free plan versus the paid plans. I could see the features across all the paid plans… but not how that compared to the free plan. It would be helpful to understand as it might cause me to jump into a paid plan.

All in all I think it is a very useful reminder that WordPress can support these kind of interactions over email.

I may consider moving an older newsletter over to this platform and trying it out in 2023.

What do you think about this news?

Mar 08

Testing from WordPress iOS app

Just a test… nothing to see here! Move along now… and have a nice day!

Oct 13

Testing Automatically Creating a Twitter Thread from a WordPress post

By way of a mention on Techmeme today, I learned that WordPress now allows you to tweet out a blog post as a linked thread of tweets. You can do this either using the hosted WordPress.com solution – or using self-hosted WordPress with the Jetpack plugin.

The Jetpack plugin included this feature as part of the 9.0 release on October 6, 2020.

All you need to do to use it is to:

  1. Connect a Twitter account via Jetpack.
  2. Press the Jetpack icon in the upper right.
  3. Write your blog post

You can see the setting you need to choose in this screenshot:

In theory, I’m supposed to be seeing little marks in the WordPress editor showing me where each tweet would end. I see a Twitter symbol, but it seems to move with me, and I know I have already written way more than can be in a single tweet.

(I see now that when I go back and click through the text, the Twitter symbols do show me where each Tweet will begin and end.)

My initial thought was sort of … why would I want to use this? Typically the writing I do for a blog post is very different – and often much longer – than I want for social media.

I like to write longer posts on my blogs, and then link to them from Twitter. It just seems like apples and oranges – two very different types of content.

However, as I’ve thought more about it, there is one use case I could see for this. Sometimes I know in advance that I want to create a thread on Twitter.

If I just go and create the thread on Twitter, there are a couple of issues:

  • I usually want to create the thread in another editor first, so that I have my thread all figured out. (Not always… sometimes a thread just happens very organically, but sometimes I do want to write it all before tweeting.)
  • The text is locked inside of Twitter’s “walled garden” of content. Yes, I can refer people to it… but it’s locked inside of Twitter. If they decide to remove my tweets, or remove my access to my account, I could lose the content.

Writing a post inside of WordPress allows me to solve both of these issues. I can easily write out text in advance, and, regardless of whatever Twitter may or may not do with my content, I have a copy on my own website.

What do you think? Will you use this new WordPress feature to create Twitter threads? (Or is this just something that will clog up Twitter timelines?)

UPDATE #1: As advertised, Jetpack very nicely created a thread on Twitter. It also added a final tweet that points over to this blog post where you can read the whole thread:

This obviously removes the need to use one of the various services that gather all the tweets in a thread so that you can read them on a single page (and share the link to that single page). Very nicely done.

Dec 08

Watch: the 2018 "State of the Word" from WordCamp US

Tonight in Nashville, Matt Mullenweg delivered his "State of the Word" presentation at WordCamp US. Not being there in person, I watched the live stream. The recorded stream has about 28 minutes of various quotes that were displayed. Matt starts at shortly after the 28-minute mark:

He shows some very cool ways that Gutenberg can work. Starting at around 54 minutes, Matt moves into showing what the next phases of Gutenberg will be. In a "Phase 2" during 2019, more of the admin interface will be moved into blocks. Phase 3 (2020 at the earliest) will be about collaboration, multiuser editing and workflows. Phase 4 (later) will be about having an official multilingual interface.

And then around the 1:12:00 mark, he mentions a fantastic statistic that over 57% of WordPress sites were using HTTPS (i.e. TLS):

Wordpress and https

Matt goes on with much more information about the WordPress community, more developements - and then finally concludes "The State of The Word" at around the 1:21:00 mark and moves into questions... of which there was about another 45 minutes of long discussions and questions.

Dec 07

Initial Thoughts on WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg

Wordpress 5 0

Yesterday (Dec 6, 2018) was TheBigDay when WordPress 5.0 with the Gutenberg block-based editor landed in all of our WordPress sites for upgrade. Some of the places to learn more about the launch include:

Changing the core editor over to Gutenberg was a massive effort over the past two years - and the launch this week was both an amazing accomplishment... and a very divisive event within the WordPress community.

I was very much hoping to be down in Nashville for WordCamp US this weekend, where parts of the community will be gathering. I expect it will be quite a passionate weekend! (Unfortunately some family medical issues kept me closer to home.)

I *really* like Gutenberg...

My initial reaction was... I really LIKE Gutenberg!

Now, I've been playing with it for much of the last year, and the more I work with it, the more I like it.

It really DOES enable more beautiful and powerful publishing with great ease.

I'm looking forward to doing even MORE with it and learning how far we can go with using Gutenberg.

... but it needs to work! :-(

However, after the upgrade to WordPress 5.0, the Gutenberg editor didn't work on all my sites. For several of my sites, I had NO PROBLEM after the update. It "just worked." I was immediately able to go in and start editing with Gutenberg.

But on a couple of other sites, when I went in to edit an existing page or post - or to create a new one - I made all my changes and pressed the "Update" or "Publish" button and...

Gutenberg updating failed

"Updating failed" in a big red bar across the top of the screen!

Amusingly to me, some searching on the web brought me back to a Github issue I had opened back in August 2017.

All I had to do to "fix" the issue was this:

  1. Go to Settings -> Permalinks, and change it from "Month and name" to "Day and name" and press "Save changes". I received the message "Permalink structure updated."
  2. Change it from "Day and name" back to "Month and name" and press "Save changes". I received the message "Permalink structure updated."
  3. Switch back to the tab where I was editing the post and had the error message. Pressed "Update" and.. ta da... the updating worked perfectly fine.

I had to do this on two different WordPress sites (both running on the same WordPress multisite server). Strangely, other sites on the multisite server were fine.

While the fix was easy, it concerns me that I had to do this and that I didn't really do anything. But somehow my act of changing the Permalink Settings did SOMETHING internally to make things work.

That concerns me.

Now, someone in that ticket or elsewhere suggested that this particular issue was NOT a Gutenberg issue, but rather an issue with the REST API, which Gutenberg uses.

Regardless, my point was that I couldn't use the editor to make changes on my site.

And beyond my own issue, I see many other Gutenberg issues piling up on Github. Now, yes, these may be initial launch pains for launching such a massive change.

But I do hope the team of developers can fix these in the 5.0.1 release that I'm sure will come quickly.

I really DO like the Gutenberg editor - and I look forward to seeing all we collectively can do with it!

P.S. This post was NOT written using Gutenberg because this Disruptive Conversations site is sadly still over on TypePad. I look forward to migrating it some day so that I can use Gutenberg!

Dec 04

WordPress 5.0 now targeted to launch on…. Thursday! (Dec 6)

Printing blocks unsplash raphaelphotoch

The news out of Matt Mullenweg last night was...

THURSDAY!

That day, December 6 (2018), is the next target release date for WordPress 5.0.

If you have been paying attention to WordPress, or listening to any of my reports into the For Immediate Release (FIR) podcast over the last, say, year or so, you would know that WordPress 5.0 is a huge departure from all previous WordPress releases. The big change is the replacement of the default text editor with the new "Gutenberg" block-based editor.

Personally, I'm rather excited about the change. I've been using Gutenberg on a number of my sites and really like how much you can do with it.

But... reaction within the WordPress community and ecosystem has been decidedly mixed.

Matt's post has more info.

We'll see if it happens! But if you are a WordPress site operator, get ready! 5.0 is coming soon!

Photo by Raphael Schaller on Unsplash

Dec 02

WordPress.com Offering free .Blog subdomains for new sites

 

The good folks over at WordPress.com are doing something interesting - they are giving free .blog subdomains for any new sites created on WordPress.com.

Now, to be clear, this is not ANY subdomain under .blog. For instance, I was immediately curious if I could get “danyork.blog”, but no, they are giving away for free third-level subdomains under the following second-level domains:

  • art.blog
  • business.blog
  • car.blog
  • code.blog
  • data.blog
  • design.blog
  • family.blog
  • fashion.blog
  • finance.blog
  • fitness.blog
  • food.blog
  • game.blog
  • health.blog
  • home.blog
  • law.blog
  • movie.blog
  • music.blog
  • news.blog
  • photo.blog
  • poetry.blog
  • politics.blog
  • school.blog
  • science.blog
  • sport.blog
  • tech.blog
  • travel.blog
  • video.blog
  • water.blog

So I could possibly get “danyork.tech.blog”, “danyork.news.blog”, “york.family.blog”, or “Vermont.travel.blog”. Basically, a free domain underneath that set of domains.

When you create a NEW site (and that is important because this is currently NOT available to existing WordPress.com sites), you will have a chance to claim one of these subdomains in this process.

Now, for most of us who are more serious about this, we may already have a domain. Or at least will want to get our own.

But for someone just starting out, I could see this being a useful way to get started without having to buy a domain, get it set up, etc.  Cool move by the Automattic team behind WordPress.com!

Dec 01

Video: Using Docker Compose to install WordPress

Shortly after publishing my last post about how to use Docker to install WordPress and MySQL, I happened to watch a video showing basically the same process:

The speaker walks through the steps you need to do to create the docker-compose.yml file I referenced in that last post.

Enjoy!

Nov 26

New Github repo for using WordPress with Docker

As I wrote over on my Disruptive Conversations site, I’ve been playing around with using Docker as a way to easily test new WordPress versions and plugins.  As part of that testing, I was trying to use the official WordPress image found on Dockerhub.

However, I was struggling with getting started, because the WordPress container is just… WordPress. It also needs a database to work, and my Docker experience was not yet strong enough to sort out how to link various containers together. So I raised an issue on Github asking about a step-by-step tutorial.

Github user wglambert very kindly provided a simple docker-compose.yaml file that could launch both WordPress and MySQL in separate containers and set up the necessary network and links.

It works wonderfully! And it has now been added to the instructions on DockerHub. (Thank you to the DockerHub admins for merging it in.)

Because I want to easily use the file on different systems, I put it up in a Github repo:

https://github.com/danyork/wordpress-basic-docker

Any of you are welcome to use it, too!

As I noted in my Disruptive Conversations article, I’m planning to start writing here a good bit more about using Docker. I’m rather impressed by all that can be done – and want to capture my own experiments here for my own future knowledge… and if it helps any of you all out, too, all the better!