Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Tag: WordPress

  • Testing the Bluesky integration

    I was curious what the WordPress to Bluesky integration via Jetpack social looked like so I created this test post. I’m making the big switch from posting my treadmill and hockey content on Threads to sharing that content on Bluesky going forward. The WordPress integration seemed to be pretty easy to set up, but I wanted to see what the content actually looked like in action. The social preview indicates that the first couple of sentences will get posted within Bluesky with the link to the actual WordPress content.

    I took a quick screenshot of what the post ended up looking like over on Bluesky. The integration appears to work as advertised and was pretty easy to set up.

    It does not appear that updates made to the post after publishing have any impact within the Bluesky integration so that is good. It would be unfortunate if every update triggered another integration event.

  • 20250113

    Apparently turning off the newsletter email notifications in WordPress was actually pretty straightforward and easy to accomplish. I just missed a really simple on and off step required to make this change happen to suppress the email notifications. You just have to follow the following steps: 1) Jetpack, 2) settings, 3) newsletter, and then 4) disable the “Let visitors subscribe to this site and receive emails when you publish a post” setting. Making this change stopped the whole newsletter email thing I was worried about and I converted all the older posts within scope from private to public using the bulk update functionality. Right now we are sitting at 948 public posts and 1,446 private posts. Posts have been unlocked back until June 2017. That seems like a reasonable enough spot to just stop. Anything older than 2017 probably needs to be looked at again and edited for quality, continuity, and sometimes completeness.

    Tonight I’m going to spend some time watching Monday Night Football on the over the air (OTA) broadcast. It’s nice to be able to just watch the game without having to subscribe to ESPN. Right now the subscription that I’m willing to pay for on a monthly basis is the Altitude+ application that allows me to have access to most of the Colorado Avalanche games. I still have an actual working FM radio upstairs that lets me listen to almost all of the games. Sometimes the Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche games overlap creating a broadcasting conflict. That subscription so far this year has been totally worth it. I would prefer if all the local broadcasts happened over the air for sporting events where the stadium was publicly subsidized. That however is not really the way things are unfolding as the number of streaming platforms just keeps increasing. Even streaming the NFL games requires so many different subscription options. I’m not surprised that year over year ratings were down for the NFL as it’s getting harder and harder to find the games. 

    I was hoping for a competitive game tonight. That does not appear to be happening in the first half of the game.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado

  • 20250105

    It’s time for some WordPress site development updates this morning. The categories page now has both monthly and category archives that will just continue to update with counts going forward. I don’t have a search box on any of the standard content pages. The 404 page has a search box, top content, and the monthly and category archive drop downs. I figured that having a search box on that page was rather harmless and mostly useful for somebody who was looking for a page that no longer exists. I have unlocked the previously private content posts from December 2021 to current. That means 281 posts are currently unlocked and 2,189 need to be released at some point. 

    Generally speaking that previously available and now private content is available within internet archives so making it available here is not novel or all that interesting. I am trying to be careful when converting content over so that it does not cause the fresh content email and notifications to go out to everybody. That would be an annoying number of notification pings and weblog related emails. 

    That was a lot of weblog related updates to share for a Sunday morning. I’m pretty sure my tinkering with the new weblog deployment is going to slow down shortly. Even a brand new theme deployment only requires so much tinkering to get it into a serviceable condition for go forward weblog delivery. I had some time to engage in tinkering yesterday during the course of watching two NFL games and the Colorado Avalanche playing hockey into overtime. Watching sports and tinkering on my MacBook Air M3 has been working out well enough. I do strongly prefer to work on a 38 inch monitor, but that is not the only way to get things done. It’s just the most productive. 

    My current setup includes a FlexiSpot standing desk with an AWMS-2-BT75-FS model monitor stand from ATDEC. Both computer screens hardly move or wiggle during the transition from sitting to standing. They don’t shake during the typing process either which is a vitally important consideration. Both monitors are 38 inch Dell UltraSharp curved screen units and they are VESA mounted to the ATDEC monitor stand. The stacked deployment offers a lot of screen real estate for getting work done. They are plugged into a Dell WD22TB4 Thunderbolt 4 docking station by USB-C and that is how via a single USB-C cable the entire desktop setup can be swapped between computers.  

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado