meta – Chris McLeod

This toot by Dave Winer reminded me I meant to write down how I’m trying to make sure I write more on this blog in 2023, even if it might be more trivial than what I’ve historically written here in the past.

Basically: if I catch myself writing a post somewhere else, and I’m approaching the character limit, putting in line breaks/formatting, or otherwise notice that with a bit of light editing it could be a short blog post, then I copy the text over to here and make it fit. I want the order of priority of where I post to to be:

Here, first and foremost, for anything that has even a modicum of thought put into it.
Mastodon, for anything that’s totally throwaway
My new micro blog for anything that fits anywhere between either those two (mostly I’m going to use it for tracking my reading progress, but it might get the odd link post or stray thought too )

Thanks to fediverse integration in all of the places I write, plus support for multiple feed formats, getting my words “out there” isn’t something I need to worry about, so I’m just going to try to concentrate on writing instead.

ActivityPub vs Jetpack Boost

I just had an interesting issue where the ActivityPub plugin started reporting that my author page on both this site and Worlds In Miniature was no longer serving valid JSON, and so was inaccessible:

a screenshot of part of the WordPress site health screen. It shows 1 Critical issue reported by the ActivityPub plugin:

"Author URL is not accessible

Your author URL https://worldsinminiature.com/author/chris/ does not return valid JSON for application/activity+json. Please check if your hosting supports alternate Accept headers."

Sure enough, checking the URL with cURL, or an HTTP client like Thunder gave a 200 response but no response body. It had been several days since I had last made any changes behind the scenes, and everything had been working in the interim, so I was a bit stumped.

Anyway, after a bit of digging around, I came upon this thread and specifically this post which pointed me to the problem: Jetpack Boost. It wasn’t the most recent plugin I’d installed, and – as I mentioned – things had been working fine since I had installed it… but something had happened in the background which had broken things, and turning off Jetpack Boost as a first test instantly solved the problem.

Later in the thread the problem is tracked down to specifically the “Defer non-essential JavaScript” option, so if you’re having trouble with ActivityPub, and have Jetpack Boost installed, turn this option off to fix the conflict.