I’ve tweaked how I’ve used this site with micro.blog a few times. During the last change, I inadvertently broke my ability to create most types of new posts on micro.blog.
The short explanation is that I installed a plugin that detected when I added the “microblog” category to a post, and kept those posts on their own section of the site. This kept microblog-categorized posts off the front page and out of the 40Tech RSS feed. The problem was that the RSS feed is how micro.blog gets content from WordPress sites, so all posts tagged with microblog didn’t make it through to the micro.blog service. I had the micro.blog apps configured to add that category to any new posts, so those posts were falling into a black hole.
I’ve now fixed the problem. This involved making a few changes:
- I added some code to my functions.php file (located in a child theme) to keep any posts that are in my microblog category out of my main feed. That category still shows up in all other feeds, such as category-specific feeds. I found this code snippet in a blog post by Simon Wheatley.
- I added more code to my functions.php file to keep any posts in my microblog category off my home page. The web is replete with blog posts on how to exclude categories from your home page.
- I plugged only a category-specific feed into my settings at micro.blog. In my case it was this feed: https://www.40tech.com/category/microblog/. This means that only posts I categorize as “microblog” will show up for other users at micro.blog. When I post with the micro.blog apps, the posts are automatically assigned this category. This won’t send new articles to micro.blog, but that’s OK. I usually want to type a few comments about an article, and the main feed would only send a tittle and link to micro.blog. Now I can control how my content appears at micro.blog.
There are other ways I’ve configured the site for micro.blog, such as using a plugin for webmentions, but that’s a story for another day.
