Category: Wordpress

twitter free

whbeebe

You can tell the wheels keep falling off of Twitter when you get emails like the following from other businesses effected by Twitter’s, i.e. Musk’s hair brained decisions.

I received this email from WordPress on 10 February. WordPress is the group that hosts my blog. Twitter wrote that they were cutting off free access to the Twitter API. It’s that free access I use to automatically post to my Twitter account whenever I post an entry, such as this one. I don’t know when free access to the Twitter API is supposed to end except it’s Real Soon Now. Here’s the gist of the WordPress email.

Twitter recently announced they would end free access to the Twitter API on February 9th. A recent update extended that date to February 13th.

As a result of these unexpected changes, it is possible that Jetpack Social may experience some temporary outages when automatically sharing your posts directly from WordPress to Twitter.

We’re working with Twitter to find the best solution for our mutual users, so your workflows are not disrupted. We will reach out again when we have more information on the path forward.

Please feel free to connect with support if you need any help.

The WordPress.​com team

I pulled a copy of all my tweets from Twitter in January. I’ve now turned off publishing to Twitter, just like I turned off publishing to Facebook years ago. I have far more blog followers than I’ve every had Twitter followers (as if collecting either Twitter or WordPress followers was ever a goal for me; it wasn’t and never will be).

The 2016 election cycle pretty much killed all social media for me. Twitter is the last Big Social Media platform I was still on, but I’ve been winding down all my access to the platform as well as getting a full backup of my history on the platform. Practically speaking I’m pretty much gone from Twitter. I think I’ll just hang around and watch what happens. I have a morbid interest in watching Musk burn the whole thing down.

why i removed the ios wordpress app off my iphone

whbeebe3 Comments

I deleted the iOS WordPress app off my iPhone over the weekend. Of all the various WordPress apps, the one for the iPhone is probably the worst in my humble opinion. While I can walk through a litany of failures and annoyances, the biggest failure/annoyance is that the WordPress app hooks into the Safari browser. Here’s why that’s a problem for me.

I have my WordPress environment configured so that when someone likes or comments on a post it is indicated by an orange notification or “badge” in Apple-speak over a bell in that upper right corner of the web page. Tap that indicator/bell and a full-screen listing slides from right to left showing all the likes and comments in reverse chronological order. When I go to tap on the like or comment it further opens to the story with all the likes and comments listed beneath. When I tapped the story link, if the WordPress iOS app is installed, then the app shows the story, not the Safari browser (I do that to quickly scan the article and make sure I haven’t left any gross misspelled words or horrific grammatical errors). Calling the iOS WordPress app instead of staying in Safari is the primary problem. There is no way to configure the app from doing that. None.

If you’ve never used the WordPress app to read posts, let me tell you that the rendering is horrible. Safari might have its critics, but the problems Safari has pale to insignificance when compared to the WordPress iOS app. I hate having to use that app, either indirectly through the Safari link or explicitly. I have a number of WordPress blogs I try to follow via the reader function of the app. It’s good to have them in one place so I can browse them in reverse chronological order. But I can’t stand the way the WordPress iOS app wants to render pages. Which I find bizarre because all iOS apps are required to use the same rendering engine that Safari does when rendering web content.

The iOS WordPress app is gone. For the blogs I follow I now have a folder on Safari where I keep WordPress links. It’s not as convenient as I have to explicitly check each site for activity, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. If I really want to use a genuine WordPress app, I use the one on my iPad. While it’s a bit better than the iOS app (but not by much), it’s still not as good as just viewing the blog on Safari. There’s no way to tell the WordPress app to use Safari, just like there’s no way to stop Safari from calling up the WordPress app.

I wish the WordPress app was open source, so I could go in myself and fix these issues. I might as well wish for a unicorn to go with my six cats.