Carpet Bomberz Inc.

Tag: Wordpress

  • Operation Crossroads

    yesterday was teh “Trinity” test,… we’ve gone way past that one now

    So CogDogBlog in the truest most generous sense took my posting from yesterday and started asking questions and got some answers. And now I can verify I do, I DO have the ActivityPub plug-in. Believe it or not. I had bumped into the settings once, partially set them up. But still no joy it wasn’t “just working” for me. So in honor of our predecessors who invented the Atomic Bomb, I will start code-naming each one of these attempts similarly to that used by US Army/Air Force/Atomic Energy Commission circa 1946.

    Today’s attempt is to step-wise follow Alan’s ActivityBlog run-down from a few days ago (here: https://cogdogblog.com/2026/01/free-bonuses-wordpress-activitypub-plugin/) and narrow down what/why things are happening.

    Here now should be an oEmbed of the @cosocial.ca Toot from 3hrs. ago today on Alan’s ActivityPub stream.

    Alan is @cogdog

    @pfefferle Is @activitypub.blog available on all WP.com blogs?

    I tried it early on a few free WP.com blogs I use for experimenting, and it is active on all of mine, not via a plugin, just under the settings.

    Do all WP.com free users have this? What about those with a hosted domain?

    Wordpress dashboard menu showing the selection of Settings on left with a red arrow towards the submenu of 10 items, pointing to ActivityPub.
    January 8, 2026, 4:16 pm 0 boosts 2 favorites

    Boo-yah!
    Well Hot Dog, we have a weiner!
    This is now working for some reason. Folks what you see above is a full-on oEmbed of Alan’s Toot showing where the ActivityPub setting is on WordPress (all of them,… free, .com or .org). The only thing I did differently was to add a “header image” to one of the tabs in the settings. Could it be that simple? Did I do anything else different? Dunno. But one good turn deserves another. If that was the first test (we’ll call it Able). The next one will be Baker, same as Operation Crossroads.

    Here now should be Alan’s demonstration link and ActivityPub oEmbed of Andy Rush’s Christmas message example from Alan’s same blog entry re: Activity Pub:

    Andy Rush

    The biggest fireplace I’ve ever had. Merry Christmas everyone!

    A fireplace video on the wall from a projector and Christmas tree with colorful lights.
    December 25, 2025, 1:19 am 1 boosts 3 favorites


    Garsh!
    It worked the 2nd time too!

    I think without jinxing it, I will say ActivityPub works for ME.

    And it can work for You TOO!

    If you have WordPress.com, or WordPress.org or you’re just a free tier participant in either group,… You HAVE the power. ActivityPub is just a slightly bend, configure, fill out the form fields, enable the things. And you now are hosting your own Federated Identity, ActivityPub socialz node of your own.

    No ifs, ands or buts. Although, it is hosted on WordPress.com,… so they could knock me off this platform. But I OWNS my own domain. So take that!

    All of us together Alan, Andy and me,… there’s nothing we can’t do! 👍

    Me with Alan’s blog entry re:ActivityPub on hte left and on the right-side my ActivityPub settings on WordPress.com

  • Accidental Time Capsule: Moments from Computing in 1994 (from RWW)

    Byte Magazine is one of the reasons Im here today, doing what I do. Every month, Byte set its sights on the bigger picture, a significant trend that might be far ahead or way far ahead. And in July 1994, Jon Udell to this very day, among the most insightful people ever to sign his name to an article was setting his sights on the inevitable convergence between the computer and the telephone.

    via Accidental Time Capsule: Moments from Computing in 1994, by 

    Jon Udell
    Jon Udell (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    I also liked Tom Halfhill, Jerry Pournelle, Steve Gilmore, and many other writers at Byte Inc. over the years too. I couldn’t agree more with Scott Fulton, as I still am a big fan of Jon Udell and any projects he worked on and documented. I can credit Jon Udell for getting me to be curious about weblogging, Radio Userland, WordPress, Flickr and del.icio.us (social bookmarking website). And watching his progress on a ‘Calendar of Public Calendars’, The elmcity project. Jon’s attempting to catalog and build an aggregated list of calendars that have RSS style feeds that anyone can subscribe to. No need for automated emails filling a filtered email box. No, you just fire up a browser and read what’s posted. You find out what’s going on and just add the event to your calendar.

    As Jon has discovered the calendar exists, the events are there, they just aren’t evenly distributed yet (ie much like the future). So in his analysis of ‘what works’ Jon’s found some sterling examples of calendar keeping and maintenance some of which has popped up in interesting places, like Public School systems. However the biggest downfall of all events calendars is the all too common practice of taking Word Documents and exporting them as PDF files which get posted to a website. THAT is the calendar for far too many organizations and it fails utterly as a means of ‘discovering’ what’s going on.

    Suffice it to say elmcity has been a long term goal of organizing and curatorial work that Jon is attempting to get an informal network of like-minded people involved in. And as different cities form up calendar ‘hubs’ Jon is collecting them into larger networks so that you can just search one spot and find out ‘what’s happening’ and then adding those events to your own calendar in a very seamless and lightweight manner. I highly recommend following Jon’s weblog as he’s got the same ability to explain and analyze these technologies that he excelled at while at Byte Inc. And continues to follow his bliss and curiosity about computers, networks and more generally technology.

    Related articles