René’s old blog
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WordPress drama
As a WordPress user for two-decades, I have followed the latest drama in the WordPress world with some attention.
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has been lashing out against WP Engine, a competitor to his own company Automattic. Both engage in large-scale hosting of small websites, based on modified versions of the open-source WordPress software.
The whole debacle has revealed what a sordid mess the governance of the WordPress project is.
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StarLite tablet and Debian Testing
I received my StarLite mk V Linux tablet from StarLabs systems a couple of weeks ago. It came with Ubuntu, but as a Debian user for some twenty years, my preference was for Debian, as I have on all the other computers.
I tried with Ubuntu for a while, but even if the differences aren’t that huge, it was still a nuisance.
My main preoccupation was that I’d lose much of the tablet-specific parts, such as the touch interface, if I abandoned the vendor supplied OS.
Consequently, I have installed Debian Testing on the thing.
The TL;DR is that everything works, almost out of the box.
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Changing owner of a calendar in Nextcloud
I needed to change the owner of a shared Nextcloud calendar, preferable without causing too many problems for the other user of the calendar (my wife).
Exporting and importing into a new calendar would do that, I feared.
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A WordPress-Nextcloud writing workflow
I spend a large part of my time working on my website, which is an essential part of my business. The site is about the history of Venice, considered very widely, and a lot of studying and drafting goes into it.
My main website is self-hosted WordPress, but WordPress is not sufficient for what I do.
The preparatory work going into writing for the website, requires space for literature, sources, images, maps, notes, brainstorming drafts and much more.
If I tried to do that in WordPress, it would be an unwieldy mess of uploaded gigabytes of PDFs and other files, which I would have to keep locally too.
A private Nextcloud instance is a much better solution.
With Nextcloud, I have a web-interface to the files with a set of remote apps and functions available, but I also have all the files locally. The synching is fast enough to allow me to switch between remote and local apps without any real problems.
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Paste with two-finger tap in Wayland [solved]
When I moved to Wayland from Xorg — initially just to try it out — the only grievance I had was that on a laptop with a touchpad, a two-finger tap would act as a right-click and bring up the context many.
I have been used to that doing a middle-click — pasting the clipboard — since I started using Unix workstations sometimes in the mid-1980s.
There didn’t seem to be an easy way to remap the mouse buttons, as you could easily in Xorg.
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Post length with ActivityPub
Many WordPress web-sites now use the ActivityPub plugin, which federates the web-site with the rest of the Fediverse.
I’ve quite come to like the idea of such an integration — if only people would comment some more 🙂
What has bothered me a bit, is that plenty of Fediverse posts coming from WordPress blogs contain the entire post, which is sometimes very long. Get a few of those in a search result on your phone, and you’ll be scrolling a lot for very little gain.
The problem is that when configuring the ActivityPub plugin, the only options are either the entire content, or just the excerpt. If you actually use the excerpt field as intended, that’s either everything or at most 150 characters.
We need something in between. Fortunately, there’s a way.
Fediverse reactions
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OpenWrt and DMZ
Most commercial routers have some simplified way of defining a local host as a DMZ host.
Incoming traffic on the wan side is forwarded to the DMZ host, while firewall rules will then prevent traffic from the DMZ host to the others on the LAN.
This is a fairly simple way of having a server exposed to the internet, while still being easily accessible from the LAN.
OpenWrt doesn’t have such an option, but it can be done.
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synogear install
This is running on a Synology DMS home NAS. Having been running Unix and Linux for forty years, I’m rather used to overseeing my own systems. Not so much with the NAS.
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Hyphens and dashes in WordPress
One or more hyphens in WordPress can produce a single hyphen (-), an en dash (–) or an em dash (—), but it’s not entirely straightforward.
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De-googling
I have tried for ages to de-google. Not just from Google itself, but all the big ones — Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon. However, de-googling is not easy.
The main problem is that of surveillance capitalism. These giant corporations — and many others — spy on you to sell or exploit the data for commercial purposes. While you can decide not to buy, they can used that information for other purposes.
Once the information is there, it will be used, and often for nefarious purposes to our own detriment. Often, once we’ve lost control of our data, it’ll be used against us.
One example: a recent case in the USA where mother and daughter ended up in prison for an abortion performed in another state, based on their Facebook messages, willingly handed over by Meta.
It is very much in our interest not to give these corporations our data.
We can do something, but it is not easy and it doesn’t go all the way. It can be very hard indeed, if you have family, friends or even a job, and most of us do.
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ActitivityPub and DDOS
On a work related web site I made two posts on January 15th, at 7.35 in the morning.
In the following few hours my tiny server took quite a beating, at least compared to what it normally gets. The activity was sufficient to make the site periodically unresponsive.
It is not the first time this happens, and it is related to ActivityPub.
