The Phoenix Trap

Code, music, philosophy, etc.

Tag: blogging

  • WordPress, ActivityPub, and Friends

    I’ve also been mess­ing with the Friends and ActivityPub plu­g­ins for WordPress on my blog, and I share Shelley’s con­cerns about the for­mer bloat­ing the data­base with feed items. You can con­trol this some­what by set­ting reten­tion val­ues in days or a num­ber of posts, but you have to go into each friend’s Feeds tab and do it manually–there’s no default setting.

    After read­ing that post, I’m also con­sid­er­ing dis­abling Friends in favor of a feed read­er, espe­cial­ly because (as Shelley also not­ed) there are gaps when with favorites and com­ment con­ver­sa­tions bridg­ing between WordPress and Mastodon servers. Like her, I’m not keen on installing a single-​user Mastodon instance or oth­er fedi­verse serv­er that requires man­ag­ing an unfa­mil­iar pro­gram­ming language.

    I’m also try­ing to do this in tan­dem with a suite of IndieWeb plu­g­ins, and I’m run­ning into an issue with my friends feed page not show­ing any posts when the Post Kinds plu­g­in is acti­vat­ed. I real­ly want to keep this plu­g­in because it lets me inter­act bet­ter with oth­er IndieWeb sites as well as the Bridgy POSSE/​back­feed ser­vice con­nect­ing me to oth­er social networks.

    My ide­al is a per­son­al web­site where I write every­thing, includ­ing long-​form arti­cles, short sta­tus­es, and replies like these. Folks can then find me via a sin­gle iden­ti­fi­able address and then subscribe/​follow the entire fire­hose of con­tent or choose sub­sets accord­ing to post types, top­ics, or tags. They’d then be able to reply or react on my site or their favored plat­form, which my site would col­lect regard­less of ori­gin, with sub­se­quent replies and reac­tions get­ting pushed out to them. Oh, and it should work with both ActivityPub clients and servers, IndieWeb sites, and syndicate/​backfeed to oth­er social net­works either with or akin to the Bridgy ser­vice I men­tioned above.

    So far I haven’t seen any­thing that ticks all these box­es, and I’m get­ting itchy to write my own. Perl is my favorite pro­gram­ming lan­guage, so I’m look­ing at the Yancy CMS as a base. But I know that it would still be a hell of a project, and one of the rea­sons I chose WordPress for blog­ging was that it was well-​established and ‑sup­port­ed but still eas­i­ly exten­si­ble so that I could con­cen­trate on writ­ing instead of end­less­ly tweak­ing the engine. Unfortunately, I’m start­ing to fall into that trap anyway.

  • Video: ​“A Year of Being Wrong on the Internet”

    I’m busy this week host­ing my par­ents’ first vis­it to Houston, but I didn’t want to let this Tuesday go by with­out link­ing to my talk from last week’s Ephemeral Miniconf. Thanks so much to Thibault Duponchelle for orga­niz­ing such a ter­rif­ic event, to all the oth­er speak­ers for com­ing togeth­er to present, and to every­one who attend­ed for wel­com­ing me.

  • Speaking at Developer Career Day 2021

    I’ll be run­ning a work­shop based on my recent Blogging Outside the Bubble webi­nar dur­ing Developer Career Day 2021, which is run­ning from August 6 through 7. It’s free to reg­is­ter, with top speak­ers and prac­ti­cal career discussions.

    Find out more and reg­is­ter here!

  • DZone Contributor of the Month award

    The DZone tech pub­lish­ing site select­ed me as their Editors’ Pick Contributor of the Month for June 2021! Here’s my (bless­ed­ly brief) accep­tance speech dur­ing their month­ly awards ceremony.

    Unfortunately, they’ve just start­ed to de-​prioritize con­tent syn­di­cat­ed from else­where due to Google not index­ing it. Since every arti­cle has to go through a mod­er­a­tion and edit­ing process, this means that I may not be able to ful­fill my promise to post new Perl con­tent there every week. You can still find it here on phoenixtrap.com, of course. ☺️

  • 4 Steps to Blogging Outside the Perl Bubble

    4 Steps to Blogging Outside the Perl Bubble

    The fol­low­ing is adapt­ed from my light­ning talk ​“Blogging Outside the Bubble” at last week’s Perl and Raku Conference in the Cloud 2021. You can watch the pre­sen­ta­tion and down­load the slides here. Also, a tip: most of this applies to any­one who wants to start a blog.

    Let’s say you’re a Perl devel­op­er dis­traught at the con­tin­ued decline in usage and mind­share of your favorite language.

    You know that you do good work and that your tools and tech­niques are sound, but the world out­side of Perl-​specific forums, soft­ware archives, social media groups, and IRC chan­nels regards it as anti­quat­ed, out-​of-​date, or worse, that IT epi­thet lega­cy. (And the new­er devel­op­ers haven’t even heard of IRC!)

    Let’s say you’re wor­ried about your pro­fes­sion­al prospects both at your cur­rent employ­er and with pos­si­ble future employ­ers. Even though you know or can eas­i­ly be trained in oth­er lan­guages, Perl is still your favorite.

    Let’s say you’re me.

    What do you do?

    Step 1: Get a blog

    There are two basic types of blogs: stan­dard­ized for­mat and cus­tomiz­able. If you’re just start­ing and you want to spend more time writ­ing and less time fid­dling with tem­plates and soft­ware, choose stan­dard­ized. Here are some sites that enable you to pub­lish your work while get­ting out of your way and that have developer-​centric com­mu­ni­ties. Pick one and set up an account:

    If you want more cus­tomiza­tion options, you could try:

    • WordPress.com (host­ed, but lets you change some things around)
    • GitHub Pages (good if you’re already used to col­lab­o­ra­tive soft­ware devel­op­ment there, but requires more set­up includ­ing blog gen­er­a­tion software)
    • Or your pre­ferred host­ing provider—look for ready-​to-​go blog­ging apps like WordPress

    What did I choose? I set up WordPress on a shared plan at HostGator (full dis­clo­sure: I work there). They also offer easy man­aged WordPress host­ing for a bit more, but I like to tinker.

    And yes, the WordPress soft­ware is based on PHP. Don’t sweat that it’s not Perl. PHP does­n’t have to ​“lose” for Perl to ​“win.”

    Step 2: Write

    Finding a top­ic to write about can seem hard, but it does­n’t have to be. The Perl (and Raku) Weekly Challenge pub­lish­es two new pro­gram­ming chal­lenges every week. Work on those and pub­lish your solu­tion along with commentary.

    Or write about what­ev­er you’re work­ing on or would like to work on. Write about your favorite Perl mod­ule or fea­ture. It does­n’t mat­ter if some­one else wrote about it; you have a unique perspective.

    Coming up with a pithy title for your posts may be harder—you want to be click­bait-y but hon­est, and you want to men­tion Perl so that search engines asso­ciate your posts with the topic.

    The impor­tant thing to do is write some­thing. And length does­n’t mat­ter; one or two para­graphs is fine.

    Step 3: Promote

    Here’s the bad news: no one is going to find your blog posts on their own. You need to put them in front of read­ers where they already are.

    This means post­ing links on social net­works like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. It means dis­cus­sion groups and #hash­tags (like #perl, #programming, #webdev, etc.) on those social net­works. It means news forums like Reddit and Hacker News. And it means post­ing inside and out­side of Perl-​specific groups. Here are a cou­ple of exam­ples of the latter:

    This social pro­mo­tion might get tedious after a while, so look into plu­g­ins for your blog­ging plat­form and ser­vices like IFTTT and Zapier that will mon­i­tor your blog’s news feed and auto­mat­i­cal­ly post on your behalf.

    Also, remem­ber when I said above that there were blog­ging sites with developer-​centric com­mu­ni­ties? Even if your main blog isn’t on one of them, set up accounts and cross-​post. I repost my arti­cles on Dev.to, DZone, and Medium; all of these offer ways to import posts from your main site. One caveat: their importers don’t seem to be very smart when it comes to source code, so you may need to do a bit of edit­ing and refor­mat­ting after import.

    Lastly, I would be remiss if I did­n’t men­tion the Perl Weekly newslet­ter. Every Monday a fresh batch of Perl con­tent is sent to peo­ple’s inbox­es and you could be part of it. Contact edi­tor Gábor Szabó about pub­lish­ing links to your new blog.

    Step 4: Repeat

    Remember that con­sis­ten­cy builds trust from your audi­ence. Make time to write reg­u­lar­ly and pub­lish posts as often as you can man­age. I set a goal to pub­lish at least once a week and have kept up this pace since January of this year. You can often find new top­ics as you mon­i­tor and par­tic­i­pate in the social forums in which you’re pro­mot­ing your blog, espe­cial­ly in the com­ments. Even neg­a­tive com­ments can dri­ve new topics.

    Did this arti­cle inspire you to start a blog? Do you have more ques­tions? Let me know in the com­ments below!