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

  • 20241222

    Things are looking a little better today on the weblog design front. I did complete some testing of the new website design on an iPad, MacBook, Android phone, and my Windows machine. That testing was conducted in a frenzy of page refreshes and sizing changes.  It got tested across several different browsers including Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. Things seem to be working out well enough so far with the deployment. We are officially switched over to the WordPress Twenty Twenty-Five (2025) theme. Really digging into using the theme properly is going to take a lot more time and I’m going to need to watch a lot more videos about WordPress design. Right now I fixed the header links and a lot of the spacing and padding.

    I ended up watching the Colorado Avalanche play some hockey this evening. I booted up the Altitude+ application and watched the whole game from start to finish in stunning 1080p resolution. Overall I have been pretty happy with the new streaming solution. It has been nice to watch a lot more Avalanche games.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado

  • 20241221

    It took about 2 hours of tinkering, but the weblog has now moved over to the Twenty Twenty-Five theme. I’ll deliver a true one sentence bottom line on top (BLOT) for this one. The new weblog deployment didn’t go well. Full stop. That was one sentence. We reached a minimum viable product (MVP) so I deployed the new site and we are absolutely live online with it right now in the wild. We did not reach the 80% completed threshold before that deployment. We shipped at the minimal functional level. I was able to redo a functional header, but the overall design is terrible. It’s got really large buttons and a terrible headshot photo as a part of it. The footer is probably the most complete part of the new design; it at least is not embarrassing. Most of the real problems are in the body components that sit between the header and footer. I need a solid build and setup for two different types of pages that include a regular page format for static content and the weblog page that includes the last 10 posts. 

    Currently we have the standard out of the box Twenty Twenty-Five theme setup for both the pages and the weblog. I’m going to have to learn how to better utilize Gutenberg to improve the actual content display and setup. The days of just picking a weblog theme and happily deploying a website are apparently over. Even a basic deployment now requires a fair amount of effort to deploy something awesome. This whole conversion process made me a little bit disappointed. It was not a wholesale good experience. Even after watching a few YouTube videos with people showing tips and tricks was not enough to battle the initial barriers to quality deployment. I’m probably going to end up investing 10-12 more hours into finishing and refining the overall setup. 

    I have been reading a bunch of articles about the drama surrounding WordPress recently. Before I made the switch to WordPress deployments I had used the Six Apart product Movable Type for several years. I’ll be curious to see what happens when the drama and overall swirl related to WordPress comes to an end. Making a switch to a new system could be interesting. Sometimes I miss just using and publishing with Microsoft FrontPage which oddly was the most satisfying web deployment experience that I ever had as a website developer. 

    Quick update: It’s now the second half of the Kansas City Chiefs game and I have finished tinkering with the weblog deployment of the new Twenty Twenty-Five theme. It took a few hours of graphical user interface work in WordPress to get the deployment into something that works well enough. I realized right after finishing my efforts that no native theme export exists to make a backup. You have to backup via the backend apparently.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado

  • Figuring out the right newsletter backend

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  • Blogging along since 2002

    This blog has existed in a number of formats over the years. Different underlying platforms have supported things. Microsoft Frontpage, Movable Type, and WordPress have all been a part of the technology footprint. According to captures from the Wayback Machine you can see results dating back to 2002. Certainly that type of internet archaeology is interesting, but not entirely informative. It does serve as a reminder of the degree of permanence that exists with online works. I do have a massive word processing document with pretty much every post in order dating back that far, but I have given up a couple of times trying to edit that massive volume of work. Not that long ago I did go out and clean up some manuscripts to make sure they were back in print. Keeping things in print is an important part of them being available. 

    Emotions abound these days. I’m settling into a new situation. Even my daily monitor setup is different. It takes some time to try and figure out exactly what is next. Things unfold along the way. One of the things that I wanted to figure out was how to devote a little bit more time to producing some weblog posts. It’s interesting that WordPress cannot send more than a certain number of links back over to Twitter these days. Everything has gotten so much more political recently. Social media as a landscape is changing a ton right now. The advent of Blue Sky as a prominent player is happening as a scarcity of invites has stirred up a lot of interest. You could easily consider it a cool kids club right now. 

    Being in the camp of people who have published millions of words online I’m certainly no stranger to publishing content. I downloaded my 10,000 tweet archive the other day from Twitter. I actually almost flipped the whole collection to the “protect your tweets” side of things. Taking that course of action was briefly considered, but I figured oh well and left them online. It’s possible some new social media players are going to pop up here this year. We will see what happens in 2024 and beyond with the totality of social media engagement.

  • You certainly are able to replace the act of tweeting with WordPress posts that generate a tweet during publication

    You certainly are able to replace the act of tweeting with WordPress posts that generate a tweet during publication, but the process is a lot more work. That is probably the reason that most people would not use that methodology for posting. Other people have come to the same conclusion. I’m also pretty sure that the algorithm downranks the posts you send over that way. I’m going to really lean into building things with code. It does markedly increase the velocity of posting on the blog. I’m actually approaching 10,000 total tweets. Well I’m actually at 9,871 total tweets since March of 2009. The number of weblog posts that have been created in that same window happens to be 2,614. That number includes 1,201 published, 243 drafts, and 1,160 private posts. My velocity of tweeting was way higher than my general posting velocity. Certainly sending out tweets is a much easier thing to do than writing a more complex longer form missive. I’m not entirely sure why I ended up spending so much time today thinking about Twitter.

  • Permanence and the blog

    People who are paying Twitter right now for access to Twitter Blue would be able to post the content of a weblog into a single tweet for the most part. Right now they are allowing some longer 4,000 word tweets to exist. Only the first 280 characters display in the feed, but the content exists on Twitter and could be displayed if somebody clicked on the Tweet. At one point, in the not so distant past that would have been a real measure of permanence. Something posted on Twitter could linger for years and even be read into the congressional record. Right now that reality has changed up a bit as the permanence of Twitter is less a resolute consideration of fact. Things are shaping up in ways that make Twitter as a company seem more ephemeral. At any moment, it’s entirely possible something that was valued at 44 billion dollars could be MySpace or Pets. 

    My guess overall is that it will be more like Yahoo and something else will show up and claim the attention of the audience. Right now the supreme court is debating the very underpinning of the internet in terms of Section 230 of Title 47 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. That is perhaps the biggest potential change to how people communicate online since the advent of the internet as a mass communication platform. That is not hyperbole in any way shape or form. Removing Section 230 would change the way people utilize and interact with online platforms. Things may well get very interesting at some point in the not so distant future. It made me think a bit about what I should do with my online content shared on websites right now. That thought made me sit back and give permanence and the blog a bit more thought than it deserves. 

    Right now my oldest musing can be found on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. For better or worse those musings were scraped and live on within that framework of online archiving. Currently, the bulk of my weblog is set to a private mode with 1,160 posts being walled off from easy access. Within that collection of walled off content are pretty much things that were written before 2014. I have considered retiring things older than a year, two years, and five years before as a natural cycle of my blog content. One of the things that happens or has happened so far is that I consider putting all that blog content into manuscript form and that idea makes me cringe. It would be a huge amount of work for a very limited payoff. To that end generally just thinking about taking that course of action is enough to stop me from ever really doing that. I’ll admit that a couple documents do exist with what would have been the corpus of content, but they never got edited. All that ended up happening was in my enthusiasm at that moment I started the process to backup the content. 

    This blog is actually backed up in a couple different ways right now. Offline copies of the content are exported from WordPress and kept in a few locations. Right now the whole website and database are backed up and could be restored via a snapshot method. I’m confident that any actual effort to do a restoration would be difficult and ultimately frustrating. Every time the weblog itself has been lost before it was the images that were linked from posts were the part that ended up getting ultimately destroyed. Backing up words is easier than backing up the totality of the word, image, video, and formatting structure. 

    It turned out that this blog post was not actually 4,000 characters long. I went over to Twitter to post it and the content counting well was not all the way full. My hope for this work this morning was to produce a completely full tweet. Ultimately, I was very close to achieving that goal without building out this last little bit of filler at the very end. If you got to this part of the content, then you probably get it and know just why this last little bit exists.