Category Archives: ActivityPub

Subdirectories, Apache, and ActivityPub

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I have this terrible feeling that I may have fixed my ActivityPub issue. I was able to find this blog from my Mastodon account and follow it. If it continues to function, that’ll be the next unexpectedly pleasant surprise.

Turns out, my blog lives in a subdirectory. https://www.windchilde.com/bluedepth. The plugin flavor text, at the shallow end of the pool makes absolutely no mention of blogs living in subdirectories. It took a Github issue that ended up being one of maybe six that I ended up checking out. Here’s the page that won the day:

https://github.com/Automattic/wordpress-activitypub/issues/538

And the most important part was the blind axe-throw at .htaccess from the root of my hosting account, to cajole Apache into behaving differently than was intended. Here’s the missing bit:

“RedirectMatch “^/.well-known/(webfinger|nodeinfo|x-nodeinfo2)(.*)$” /blog/.well-known/$1$2″ – without the quotes around it, and replacing “blog” with your subdirectory.

After that was done and saved, went back to Mastodon.social, search, and put in the term @admin and poof! There it is! It found it, I could follow it. Suddenly feeling very strange because I had given up on ActivityPub completely. Apparently it works. Huh.

Well, I say that it works. This post might show up on my Home feed in Mastodon.social, if all the trained hamsters aren’t smoking meth, I guess. LOL. Only one way to find out… and hit that publish button!

ActivityPub Lulz

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Looks like adding ActivityPub plugin to this updated WordPress install isn’t working. Site Health says everything is absolutely fine, and that’s the end of the Troubleshooting guidance from the plugin.

It didn’t work before, it’s not working now, and we’re really not surprised in the least. I seriously doubt the plugin will ever work. It might work on any other host, but not iPage. Without being able to find @admin from Mastodon, there can’t possibly be any followers, and since the plugin doesn’t actually *do* anything by itself, this blog will never be visible from the Fediverse.

I’d be shocked if it ever worked. So, this blog will likely go back to being ignored and derelict. I seriously doubt anyone reads this trash, so it’s for the best.

Noises Off! LOL!

ActivityPub and the Fediverse

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I just updated my blog, finally. It took forever, because the automatic-by-the-link update method no longer works, so I had to download WordPress fresh, put it somewhere handy, and then follow the upgrade instructions I found on the Automattic site for this sort of thing. Once I had all the files updated, I refreshed my blog and it asked if it was okay to update the database, which took only moments.

Then once that was accomplished, the next step was to update PHP on my silly host, they are not helpful at all, and now that I have updated my WordPress manually, I don’t know if I ever will need their help again.

After all of that, I installed the ActivityPub plugin. It says it is functioning, but I have no idea if it really is or not, I can’t seem to get it to come up on Mastodon.Social, so perhaps a new post will trip some trigger.

The notion of writing in my blog, for long form pieces is something that might be really useful again, now that I am no longer on Facebook and this promise of expanding my social reach using ActivityPub certainly is attractive. I suppose only time will tell.