Mastodon and ActivityPub now fully working
Unless something went horribly wrong, the ActivityPub protocol now works on all Author Buzz UK sites. That means that Mastodon verified links should start verifying and Mastodon/Fediverse social media accounts can now follow our blogs. Yes, you can now subscribe to Author Buzz blogs from within your Mastodon account. One …
Is IndieWeb coming to Author Buzz UK?
Yes, it might very well be. Once I am confident that this movement (and the technology I am using to join in) is stable, I will roll it out to Author Buzz UK. After all, Author Buzz was created as a social network for authors. So why not decentralise and …
This update should make things slightly faster.
Today marks the day when we are sufficiently confident that the transfer from HTTP to HTTPS is complete. To mark this special occasion, we have begun to remove the plugin that was bridging the gap. So far, we have not seen any mixed source error messages. So hopefully we can …
Backup all the things
If there is one thing that this outage has shown me, it is that there can always be a more comprehensive backup system in place. This post should publish just after the most comprehensive, site-wide, backup of all the things has completed. That ends step one. Some backup stats Files …
Updates
I thought I would post an overview of the updates I’ve been running. Themes and plugins It is not terribly exciting. A month’s worth of bug fixes and security updates but no new features to speak of. The only really important news is that we have been silently keeping on …
Redesigning Author Buzz UK
Author Buzz UK is to get a whole new look. I posted recently about creating a WordPress Theme Framework. The idea is that it should be something that can be used as a foundation to build author-centric themes for WordPress. As I said in my last post, I am not a …
Fighting Spam
Spam – I knew that it would happen sooner or later; I would just have rather spam happened later (or never). There are two significant areas of spam that we have to fight. User Registration Spam (and spam groups) Comment Spam The user registration spam is pretty much just a …
Importing content from other platforms
Today I set myself the task of finalising the import process for a number of large blogs waiting to move into the Author Buzz family. If only life was so simple. It turns out that the last time anyone tried to import from the platforms in question was several major …
Updates and other news
In case you thought we had all upped sticks and vanished without a trace. Here is a general update on Author Buzz. The focus of the team has of late been divided into two broadly equal categories. Participating and establishing the community Coping with the heat Content Updates Now that …
Thank you, BuddyDev’s Brajesh Singh
We can finally announce some forward progress in the area of modifying member profiles to do what we need them to do. This is almost entirely down to one man who I have never met.