Steve’s Blog

Sharing My Posts on ActivityPub

Over on the KinshiPress blog, I wrote about the new connection between ActivityPub and WordPress.

During the last few years, social networks have been splintering and it would be a major improvement for social users to have control over their own profile on their own site.

Over 10 years ago, I wrote a post with this title: “There is an Open Source Rival to Facebook: WordPress“. In the last decade, the potential I described hasn’t been realized.

In that post, I walk you though how the ActivityPub plugin works, explore the key features, and see whether this is finally the open source social platform that could gain traction.

I’m Trying to Understand a New Group of Publishers

For my day job, I run PublishPress, TaxoPress, and MetaSlider which produce publishing plugins for WordPress.

Over the last couple of years, that work has introduced me to an exciting new movement of publishers and journalists. Because the movement is so new, I’ve struggled to define it and haven’t seen many other people talking about it.

The solution? I’ve been blogging through it. For about 18 months, I’ve been writing at KinshiPress, featuring these new publishers as I find.

Continue reading “I’m Trying to Understand a New Group of Publishers”

We Acquired the Tag Groups Plugin to Join TaxoPress

This is slightly old news, but worth recapping. Late in 2022, we acquired the acquired the Tag Groups plugin and added it to TaxoPress.com.

We first launched TaxoPress because there was a gap in the market. There were no good WordPress plugins to help you organize and categorize your content.

The only existing plugin I could find was called “Tag Groups, which had been created by a developer named Christoph Amthor. This was a really useful plugin that allows you to display and filter content based on taxonomy terms.

Continue reading “We Acquired the Tag Groups Plugin to Join TaxoPress”

Interview With WPTavern on Gutenberg Phase 3

Phase 3 is the most interesting part of the Gutenberg project for me personally.

Phase 3 will allow multiple users to interact with WordPress content at the same time. This is the Google Docs experience inside WordPress. Open up a document, click a button and share that document with others. Those with the correct permissions can interact with you in real time, and you can see the amendments they’re making in real-time.

I chatted about Phase 3 with Nathan Wrigley at WPTavern. We talked about why this a necessary update to WordPress, but also why it’s such a difficult feat of engineering.

Update: as Phase 3 gets close, I’ve been writing more on this topic:

Logtivity 2.0 Has Hosted Error Logs for WordPress

At Logtivity we aim solve problems faced by WordPress agencies, or anyone else who is in charge of lots of WordPress sites.

One problem that agencies kept talking about was error logs. It’s often very difficult for them to view error logs for WordPress sites. Some hosting companies require you to contact them, and a few days later, they’ll send you the logs!

With Logtivity 2.0, you’ll always have instant access to view the errors, because we host your error logs. I’ve attached a screenshot below:

Continue reading “Logtivity 2.0 Has Hosted Error Logs for WordPress”

We launched RoleUp for Onboarding and Offboarding WordPress Users

Over the years, we’ve built a lot of WordPress plugins. Recently we’ve experimenting with SaaS platforms for WordPress.

First was Watchful which is a site maintenance service.

Next was Logtivity which is a monitoring service for WordPress agencies.

This month, we’ve launched RoleUp. This a platform to onboard and offboard users from a lot of WordPress sites. You can see a preview of the RoleUp dashboard in the image below:

Continue reading “We launched RoleUp for Onboarding and Offboarding WordPress Users”

Logtivity Has Notifications That Work Across All Your Sites

I’ve been building sites and starting projects for … too many years now. Let’s say 20 years as a conservative estimate. I’ve collected dozens of sites for work, hobbies, side-projects, and for various family members.

It’s always been a pain to keep track of them. At least one site every year gets hacked and falls victim to a bad plugin, or some mistake I’ve made.

So I’ve been making full use of the “Global Alerts” we’ve just built at Logtivity.

Continue reading “Logtivity Has Notifications That Work Across All Your Sites”