Dan Q

Tag: wordpress

WCEU23 – Contributor Day

Among the many perks of working for a company with a history so tightly-intertwined with that of the open-source WordPress project is that license to attend WordCamps – the biggest WordPress conferences – is basically a given.

Dan, wearing an Automattic "Let's make the Web a better place" t-shirt, stands in front of a banner welcoming attendees to WordCamp Europe Athens 2023.
So yeah, right now I’m in Athens for WordCamp Europe 2023.

It’s frankly a wonder that this is, somehow, my first WordCamp. As well as using it1 and developing atop it2, of course, I’ve been contributing to WordPress since 2004 (albeit only in a tiny way, and not at all for most of the last decade!).

A table placeholder labelled "WP-CLI". It and s handful of Coke cans and disposable coffee cups are picked-out in colour on an otherwise monochrome and blurred picture.
If you already know what WP-CLI is… let’s be friends.

Today is Contributor Day, a pre-conference day in which folks new and old get together in person to hack on WordPress and WordPress-adjacent projects. So I met up with Cem, my Level 4 Dragonslayer friend, and we took an ultra-brief induction into WP-CLI3 before diving in to try to help write some code.

Dan takes a selfie from a round table covered in laptops, with people hacking at them.
Contributor Days are about many things, but perhaps their biggest value comes from lowering the barrier to becoming a new contributor to an open-source project by sitting you right next to somebody who already knows it well.

So today, as well as meeting some awesome folks, I got to write an overly-verbose justification for a bug report being invalid and implement my first PR for WP-CLI: a bugfix for a strange quirk in output formatting.

Screenshot showing a user running `wp plugin update --all --no-color` but the output putting the word "Success" in green.
The bug I fixed is slightly hard to describe (and even harder to explain why it matters), but here’s a summary: when you run a WP-CLI command that first displays a table and then the result, the result is likely to always appear in colour even if you specify --no-color.

I hope to be able to continue contributing to WP-CLI. I learned a lot about it today, and while I don’t use it as much as I used to in my multisite-management days, I still really respect its power as a tool.

MacBook showing an Automattic "Work For Us" web page, alongside a bottle of Corona Extra. A rooftop terrace garden and swimming pool can be seen in the background.
Did I mention lately how awesome my employers are? I promise my blog’s not always gonna be me shilling for them… but today it is.

Footnotes

1 Even with the monumental stack of custom code woven into DanQ.me, a keen eye will probably spot that it’s WordPress-powered.

2 Perhaps my proudest “built on WordPress” moment was my original implementation of OpenID for WordPress, back in 2005, which is completely obsolete now. But I’ve done plenty of other things, both useful (like the multisite installation used by the University of Oxford) and pointless (like making WordPress a CMS for Gemini, Gopher, and Finger) too over the last 20 years.

3 WP-CLI is… it’s like Drush but for WordPress, if that makes sense to you? If not: it’s a multifaceted command-line tool for installing, configuring, maintaining, and managing WordPress installations, and I’ve been in love with it for years.

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Dan Q found GC1B0P5 The Runner

This checkin to GC1B0P5 The Runner reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

What a great statue! Cache was very easy to find; despite its camo it was very visible as I walked along the adjacent path. Thanks for bringing me out of my way on my walk from my hotel to the conference I’m attending, and TFTC. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!

Dan, in a green park with water fountains, waves at the camera.

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Dan Q found GC97N64 Under the Bridge

This checkin to GC97N64 Under the Bridge reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Walking from my hotel to the site of a conference I’m attending, this morning, I stopped to find this cache. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to spot this sneaky little container! Greetings from Oxford, UK, and TFTC!

Dan, wearing a black t-shirt and a backpack, holds a tiny plastic container with a red lid. Behind him is a rough rock wall.

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Automattic Acquires ActivityPub Plugin for WordPress

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Automattic has acquired the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress from German developer Matthias Pfefferle, who will be joining the company to continue improving support for federated platforms. Pfefferle, who is also the author of the Webmention plugin, said his new role is to see how Automattic’s products can benefit from open protocols like ActivityPub.

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This is so exciting I might burst. Want to know why?

  1. Matt Mullenweg‘s commitment to ActivityPub makes me happy. WordPress made Pingback and Trackback take off, back in the day, and I believe that – in the same way – Automattic can help make ActivityPub more accessible and mainstream too.
  2. Matthias Pfefferle is both an IndieWeb and an ActivityPub star; I use (and I’ve extented upon) a lot of code he’s written every day and I sponsor him on Github! The chance that we get to work directly together is pretty slim, but it’s a chance right?

Susan A. Kitchens expressed concern that this could increase the level of ActivityPub spam out there (which right now is very low). I worry about that too. But I’m still optimistic that we can make something awesome off the back of this acquisition and keep the interpersonal Web federated, the way it ought to be.

When Twitter Loses, WordPress Wins

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

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You know who’s having a killer month? Automattic. Everyone who’s leaving Twitter seem to fall in at least one of these three camps:

  1. They have gone back to the blogosphere. (using WordPress, or WordPress.com)
  2. They have gone to Tumblr
  3. They have gone to the fediverse (of which a fairly large percentage are WordPress installs)

In all of these cases, Automattic wins.

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Some smart observations here by Alex. A fourth point worth noting is that Matt has openly suggested that former Twitter engineers might like to come join us in Automattic and help make the web a better place. We’ve changed our careers pages a little lately but we’re still the same awesome company!

Alex went on to say:

I’ll be downright shocked if Matt isn’t working very hard to get Tumblr on the fediverse ASAP. He has so much to gain in supporting this movement, and very little to lose.

That’s definitely on his mind too, which I can safely say without leaking anything because he’s hinted at it himself. Exciting times.

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Reply to OpenID for WP

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

On 14 April 2006, Matt Mullenweg said:

OpenID for WordPress plugin

This weekend I was experimentally reimplenting how my blog displays comments. For testing I needed to find an old post with both trackbacks and pingbacks on it. I found my post that you linked, here, and was delighted to be reminded that despite both of our blogs changing domain name (from photomatt.net to ma.tt and from blog.scatmania.org to danq.me, respectively), all the links back and forth still work perfectly because clearly we share an apporopriate dedication to the principle that Cool URIs Don’t Change, and set up our redirects accordingly. 🙌

Incidentally, this was about the point in time at which I first thought to myself “hey, I like what Matt’s doing with this Automattic thing; I should work there someday”. It took me like a decade to a decade-and-a-half to get around to applying, though… 😅

Anyway: thanks for keeping your URIs cool so I could enjoy this trip down memory lane (and debug an experimental wp_list_comments callback!).

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.well-known/links in WordPress

Via Jeremy Keith I today discovered Jim Nielsen‘s suggestion for a website’s /.well-known/links to be a place where it can host a JSON-formatted list of all of its outgoing links.

That’s a really useful thing to have in this new age of the web, where Refererer: headers are no-longer commonly passed cross-domain and Google Search no longer provides the link: operator. If you want to know if I’ve ever linked to your site, it’s a bit of a drag to find out.

JSON output from DanQ.me's .well-known/links, showing 1,150 outbound links to en.wikipedia.org domains, for topics like "Bulls and Cows", "Shebang (Unix)", "Imposter syndrome", "Interrobang", and "Blakedown".
To nobody’s surprise whatsoever, I’ve made a so many links to Wikipedia that I might be single-handedly responsible for their PageRank.

So, obviously, I’ve written an implementation for WordPress. It’s really basic right now, but the source code can be found here if you want it. Install it as a plugin and run wp outbound-links to kick it off. It’s fast: it takes 3-5 seconds to parse the entirety of danq.me, and I’ve got somewhere in the region of 5,000 posts to parse.

You can see the results at https://danq.me/.well-known/links – if you’ve ever wondered “has Dan ever linked to my site?”, now you can find the answer.

If this could be useful to you, let’s collaborate on making this into an actually-useful plugin! Otherwise it’ll just languish “as-is”, which is good enough for my purposes.

Gutenberg versus Elementor – the beginners challenge

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

What happens when you give Gutenberg and Elementor to complete Beginners? In this challenge, Meg and Lily (two of my daughters) are tasked with re-creating a webpage. They’ve never used Elementor or Gutenberg before, and I only gave them 30 minutes each.

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Jamie of Pootlepress challenged his daughters – who are presumably both digital natives, but have no WordPress experience – to build a page to a specific design using both Gutenberg and Elementor. In 30 minutes.

Regardless of what you think about the products under test or the competitors in the challenge (Lily + Gutenberg clearly seems to be the fan favourite, which I’d sort-of expect because IMO Gutenberg’s learning curve is much flatter that Elementor’s), this is a fantastic example of “thinking aloud” (“talkalong”) UX testing. And with (only) a £20 prize on offer, it’s possibly the best-value testing of its type I’ve ever seen too! Both the participants do an excellent job of expressing their praise of and frustration with different parts of the interface of their assigned editing platform, and the developers of both – and other systems besides – could learn a lot from watching this video.

Specifically, this video shows how enormous the gulf is between how developers try to express concepts that are essential to web design and how beginner users assume things will work. Concepts like thinking in terms of “blocks” that can resize or reposition dynamically, breakpoints, assets as cross-references rather than strictly embedded within documents, style as an overarching concept by preference to something applied to individual elements, etc… some as second nature once you’re sixteen levels deep into the DOM and you’ve been doing it for years! But they’re rarely intuitive… or, perhaps, not expressed in a way that makes them intuitive… to new users.

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Wix and Their Dirty Tricks

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it, has now decided the best way to gain relevance is attacking the open source WordPress community in a bizarre set of ads. They can’t even come up with original concepts for attack ads, and have tried to rip-off of Apple’s Mac vs PC ads, but tastelessly personify the WordPress community as an absent, drunken father in a therapy session. 🤔

I have a lot of empathy for whoever was forced to work on these ads, including the actors, it must have felt bad working on something that’s like Encyclopedia Britannica attacking Wikipedia. WordPress is a global movement of hundreds of thousands of volunteers and community members, coming together to make the web a better place. The code, and everything you put into it, belongs to you, and its open source license ensures that you’re in complete control, now and forever. WordPress is free, and also gives you freedom.

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For those that haven’t been following the relevant bits of tech social media this last week, here’s the insanity you’ve missed:

  1. Wix start their new marketing campaign by posting headphones and a secret video link to people they clearly think are WordPress “influencers”. But the video is so confusing that people thought it was a WordPress marketing campaign against Wix, not the other way around.
  2. Next, Wix launch their “You Deserve Better” website, attempting to riff off the old “Mac vs. PC” ads. It’s been perhaps most-charitably described as a “bewildering” attack ad, more-critically described as being insensitive and distasteful.
  3. Wix’s Twitter and YouTube responses suddenly swing from their usual “why is your customer service so slow to respond to me?” level of negative to outright hostile. LOL.

Sure, I’m not the target audience. I’ve been a WordPress user for 15 years, and every time I visit a Wix site it annoys me when I have to permit a stack of third-party JavaScript just to load images like they’ve never heard of the <img>tag or something. Hell, I like WordPress enough that I used it as a vehicle to get a job with Automattic, a company most-famous for its WordPress hosting provision. But even putting all of that aside: this advertising campaign stinks.

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Celebrate Seventeen

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

May 27th, 17 years ago, the first release of WordPress was put into the world by Mike Little and myself. It did not have an installer, upgrades, WYSIWYG editor (or hardly any Javascript), comment spam protection, clean permalinks, caching, widgets, themes, plugins, business model, or any funding.

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Seventeen years ago, WordPress was first released.

Sixteen years, eleven months ago, I relaunched I relaunched my then-dormant blog. I considered WordPress/b2/cafelog, but went with a now-dead engine called Flip instead.

Fifteen years, ten months ago, in response to a technical failure on the server I was using, I lost it all and had to recover my posts from backups. Immediately afterwards, I took the opportunity to redesign my blog and switch to WordPress. On the same day, I attended the graduation ceremony for my first degree (but somehow didn’t think this was worth blogging about).

Fifteen years, nine months ago, Automattic Inc. was founded to provide managed WordPress hosting services. Some time later, I thought to myself: hey, they seem like a cool company, and I like everything Matt’s done so far. I should perhaps work there someday.

Lots of time passed.

Seven months ago, I got around to doing that.

Happy birthday, WordPress!

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Identifying Post Kinds in WordPress RSS Feeds

I use the Post Kinds plugin to streamline the management of the different types of posts I make on my blog, based on the IndieWeb post types list: articles, like this one, are “conventional” blog posts, but I also publish notes (which are analogous to “tweets”), reposts (“shares” of things I’ve found online, sometimes with commentary), checkins (mostly chronicling my geocaching/geohashing), and others: I’ve extended Post Kinds to facilitate comics and reviews, for example.

But for people who subscribe (either directly or indirectly) to everything I post, I imagine it must be a little frustrating to sometimes be unable to identify the type of a post before clicking-through. So I’ve added the following code, which I’m sharing here and on GitHub in case it’s of any use to anybody else, to my theme’s functions.php: 

// Make titles in RSS feed be prefixed by the Kind of the post.
function add_kind_to_rss_post_title(){
        $kinds = wp_get_post_terms( get_the_ID(), 'kind' );
        if( ! isset( $kinds ) || empty( $kinds ) ) return get_the_title(); // sanity-check.
        $kind = $kinds[0]->name;
        $title = get_the_title();
        return trim( "[{$kind}] {$title}" );
}
add_filter( 'the_title_rss', 'add_kind_to_rss_post_title', 4 ); // priority 4 to ensure it happens BEFORE default escaping filters.

This decorates the titles of my posts, but only in my feeds, so it’s easier for people to tell at-a-glance what’s going on:

Rendered RSS feed showing Post Kinds prefixes

Down the line I might expand this so that it doesn’t show if the subscriber is, for example, asking only for articles (e.g. via this feed); I’m coming up with a huge list of things I’d like to do at IndieWebCamp London! But for now, this feels like a nice simple improvement to a plugin I love that helps it to fit my specific needs.

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Retro-PESOSing my Reviews

When I arrived at this weekend’s IndieWebCamp I still wasn’t sure what it was that I would be working on. I’d worked recently to better understand the ecosystem surrounding DanQ.me and had a number of half-formed ideas about tightening it up. But instead, I ended up expanding the reach of my “personal web” considerably by adding reviews as a post type to my site and building tools to retroactively-reintegrate reviews I’d written on other silos.

Amazon customer review
The oldest surviving review I found was my grumbling about Windows XP Home edition being just a crippled version of Pro edition. And now it’s immortalised here.

Over the years, I’ve written reviews of products using Amazon and Steam and of places using Google Maps and TripAdvisor. These are silos and my content there is out of my control and could, for example, be deleted at a moment’s notice. This risk was particularly fresh in my mind as my friend Jen‘s Twitter account was suspended this weekend for allegedly violating the platform’s rules (though Twitter have so far proven unwilling to tell her which rules she’s broken or even when she did so, and she’s been left completely in the dark).

My mission for the weekend was to:

  1. Come up with a mechanism for the (microformat-friendly) display of reviews on this site, and
  2. Reintegrate my reviews from Amazon, Steam, Google Maps and TripAdvisor
Steam review for Hacknet
Steam reviews use a “thumbs up/thumbs down” rating system rather than a “5-star” style, but h-review is capable of expressing both and more.

I opted not to set up an ongoing POSSE nor PESOS process at this point; I’ll do this manually in the short term (I don’t write reviews on third-party sites often). Also out of scope were some other sites on which I’ve found that I’ve posted reviews, for example BoardGameGeek. These can both be tasks for a future date.

DanQ.me ecosystem map showing Dan Q writing reviews and these being re-imported on demand back into DanQ.me.
The lovely diagram I drew earlier this year? Here it is with the new loop drawn on.

I used Google Takeout to export my Google Maps reviews, which comprised the largest number of reviews of the sites I targetted and which is the least screen-scraper friendly. I wrote a bookmarklet-based screen-scraper to get the contents of my reviews on each of the other sites. Meanwhile, I edited by WordPress theme’s functions.php to extended the Post Kinds plugin with an extra type of post, Review, and designed a content template which wrapped reviews in appropriate microformat markup, using metadata attached to each review post to show e.g. a rating, embed a h-product (for products) or h-card (for places). I also leveraged my existing work from last summer’s effort to reintegrate my geo*ing logs to automatically add a map when I review a “place”. Finally, I threw together a quick WordPress plugin to import the data and create a stack of draft posts for proofing and publication.

 

My review of The Rusty Bicycle as it now appears on this site.
I was moderately unimpressed by Oxford pub The Rusty Bicycle. I originally said so on Google Maps, and now I can say so here, too!

So now you can read all of the reviews I’ve ever posted to any of those four sites, right here, alongside any other reviews I subsequently reintegrate and any I write directly to my blog in the future. The battle to own all of my own content after 25 years of scattering it throughout the Internet isn’t always easy, but it remains worthwhile.

(I haven’t open-sourced my work this time because it’s probably useful only to me and my very-specific set-up, but if anybody wants a copy they can get in touch.)

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