Hello [Fedi] World, ActivityPub On

There was a moment at the [brilliant] #OER24 conference keynote duo by Catherine Cronin and Laura Czernowicz “The future isn’t what it used to be: Open education at a crossroads” when they asked the audience to Menti respond to a question about what we should do as an action.

Watching the responses roll by when I saw one that said “Blog!” I leaned forward and tapped Martin Weller on the shoulder to whisper “I see you!”

Let’s say I have been slow on that front (as Martin keeps punding them out), I have still a draft on in my brain from the conference.

That’s not this one.

I am actually just attempting to open the blocked blog flow here, with just a little nothing note, that as of this post, this WordPress powered blog (so old fashioned, eh?) is now, err once again, pumping out the posts, when/if they actually happen, directly to the Fediverse, to Mastodon, via the ActivityPub plugin.

Zzzzz. Hardly worth a blog post, is it?

Well I did a short run with it before it became part of the Automattic ship, back in maybe November 2022. it worked indeed publishing as an entity known as @topdog@cogdogblog,com, but for me, I was really looking for the means to publish to my existing Mastodon, after all it’s my stuff, and I want to reply to replies if there were anything, as me.

I went down a different route, using a duct taped approach of an IFTTT applet that listened to my blog’s RSS feed and posted to my Mastodon account via a webhook. I’ve since made a batch of these, some to post stuff to Mastodon I have tagged in Pinboard, even having my flickr photos tagged with my dog’s name posted to his own Mastodon account (this approach got nicked when IFTTT took away the ability to use web hooks from the free accounts, and I have been moving some to make.com which is vastly more powerful service).

I like having stuff flow into my own stream, not some other one. Plus with these tools, I had some flexibility to customize the output, you know , my personal touch, like putting “Just CogDogBlogged:” before the title and slapping a hashtag on the end.

But I have been seeing more use of the WordPress plugin and mentions of more features. Just on a whim, last week, I added the ActivityPub plugin to the OE Global Voices podcast site I managed (on WordPress) just to see how easy it was to set up.

Dead easy.

And then, one of those little things happen than remind me the human connections in this ginormous ball of web yarn is what makes it worth it.

I am fortunate that someone like Jon Udell follows my posts, and replies, and as its done, he mentions Matthias Pfefferle who is the genius behind the plugin, and then Matthias is asking me questions about my set up for podcasting, and lets me know of a new audio feature coming out this week.

If somehow my spitting out a mention of a small experiment leads me to talking directly to the person who builds the software? well heck, that is something I would latch on to rather than foaming on about prompt engineering.

And hence, IU am thinking, why not set it up again here on the home blog, my roost since 2003. That’s something you don’t get cashing in your chips to blog on Wix or tossing it all into email newsletter platforms. I am of the dwindling mindset of those who not only want to own my own web corner and platform, I want to play with it, tinker, and pop the hood once in a while to admire the engine.

Well this was more than a Hello World thing to test how this will spawn out into the Fedivserse. But that is my human, far from efficient way to do things.

It will thus be spit out twice to the fediverse, using each approach. Like anyone cares about my repetition and redundancy.

Now that the blog gate is open, maybe more words can get out the door here.

Featured Image: My own remix of Botticelli Birth of Venus as an homage to the blog loving Jim Groom, with the faces of the original DTLT team admiring his blog form.

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