I am considering a radical redesign
I am considering a radical redesign of the site. This change will aim to bring user content (forums, your blogs, groups, etc.) to more prominence on the front page. It will also aim to make user profiles much more dynamic. My thought is to make all content a block (main …
Stand by for changes
Currently, this site has some advanced DDoS protection in place. This is good because it almost certainly reduces spam and keeps the site relatively fast. However, the DDoS protection conflicts with ActivityPub. This is a protocol that allows people on other sites to follow you, your blog, and the news …
My ongoing war on spam
We’ve been getting a lot of spam lately. This is partly because Google needs to lock down their Gmail service from being used to generate email addresses automatically. It may also be because we are starting to show up in more search results. Whatever the reason, spam is no fun …
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 …
Story Tracker Software for Writers
This post, unlike most of our dev posts, is not about Author Buzz but about some software that I hope will be hosted on Author Buzz one day. About three years ago I realised that if I was going to make it as a professional writer, I would need to be …
Everything we know about WordPress we learned from the documentation
I cannot say this loudly or often enough: If you did not document it, it does not exist. For two straight days, I have been trying to get to the bottom of the WTF of a few basic elements of WrdPress Themes and BuddyPress. When I say basic I really …
State of the site: Features and Progress [May 2017]
Every so often I publish a post like this going over our plans and how far along they are. These posts give an overview of all the features that are active, how well we are progressing, and which features we have planned but not yet gotten out of the door. …
WordPress Child Themes: It’s a bit like that.
Creating a child theme has nothing whatsoever to do with actual children. It is a WordPress term that basically means the same as extends does in PHP. For those of you reading this that are not PHP geeks, a child theme is like creating modifications without modifying the theme itself. You …
State of the site: Features and progress
Every so often I am going to release a post like this. These posts will give an overview of all the features that are active, how well we are pregressing with getting everything working the way you would want it to and which features we have planned but not yet …
Hello world!
Welcome to Author Buzz Dev blog. As a site, we went into live development on the 27th April 2017. This blog, the first in our network, is just for us developers (well, just me at the moment) to talk about what is going on with the technical side of things. The …