@starrwulfe Ooooof. Yeah, WP has become such a bloated monster. I finally gave up on it awhile back and moved both of my blogs into a condensed single blog here and it's been fantastic. It's not perfect and while it's more limited in some ways it's so much easier. And Manton (and team) is constantly improving it.
@Denny That's looking more and more like the move for me. In fact, these last few months going paid on MB have been kind of a test of sorts so I can figure out plumbing. I don't know how difficult it is to migrate Wordpress over and preserve all the permalinks/shortlinks. Comment preservation is also probably not gonna happen either.... sigh.
@starrwulfe I just looked at your WP blog it loaded quickly ad looked nice. MB is great. I have gone back and forth. I like both but I miss many WP features including post management, inserting YT videos, tweets and the like and a backup procedure I understand. I don't really much understand Github. Manton is great and the blogs load really fast and look nice. As you pointed out I like letting anyone comment, although not many readers do.
@abc @starrwulfe On YouTube, there is a youtube plug-in that will convert any YouTube mobile link into an embed that it will add to the bottom of a post.
On commenting, yeah, I think that's interesting because the answer seems to be: it depends. We have native ActivityPub support for comments but many/most folks who are interested in Mastodon seem to be keeping a separate account so they can monitor/participate in other features such as boosts and likes. Which limits the likelihood/level of interaction one is likely to have with their micro.blog account. It seems deeper integration is coming in months with BlueSky for those folks using BlueSky. There are webmentions but they don't really function like comments and are somewhat hidden away. I had a friend ask how he could leave a comment and I referred him to Mastodon. There's no easy/obvious way for people to get a free micro.blog account for commenting which I assume is, in part, to limit spam.
It would seem though that between Mastodon/Fediverse, Blue Sky, and eventually Threads, there will be quite a few ways for commenting and following. That is one of my favorite features.
On importing, my experince importing many hundreds of WordPress posts from two blogs went perfectly. Images, permalinks were well preservered for my posts. It was very easy.
@abc That's coz' I SSH'd into the VPS, apt-getted all the things and rebooted. 😏 I think I need to make a reboot cron job that fires every 48 hours or so to clear memory cruft. @Denny Did you know the whole way Microblog works is based on webmentions and RSS feeds? Even the Mastodon stuff is in partnership with Brid.gy which you can check out in the webmentions section under accounts.
@starrwulfe I am almost certain comments do not import to Micro.blog. I don’t know about shortcodes. And I should add that I do not have your expertise with servers and WP. My WP blog is with a managed WP host. If I have a question I can contact them via chat and so far at least they respond within a minute or two and have been helpful. I hope they are doing all the stuff I don’t understand. So far my WP site is fast.
@Denny Thank you for your reply. Your website is really beautiful. I tried the YouTube plugin you mentioned but I don’t always want the video at the end of the post. On WP I use the WP Rocket plug in which will put an image in front of YT videos so they don’t slow down the site til the viewer clicks on the video. This all happens automatically and I love it. Having said that I like MB very much.
@starrwulfe WP can be frustrating. I was looking to create gallery lightboxes and installed several plugins. I found nothing intuitive about the process. You have to go to two or three different places to set styles &c. I ended up settling on Simple Lightbox which does most of what I want and seems lightweight. Honestly, it is so much easier in Squarespace.
@abc I've been creating, managing and at times hacking on Wordpress for a good 22 years or so now and it all comes down to the plugins at this point. I'm decent enough to get by with just the base functionality in 2024 Wordpress for all but the most edge-case things (like webmentions and ActivityPub). But it's gotten too intense just to create a simple post and forget about doing anything from a smartphone. Luckily Micropub abstracts most of this away so I can just concentrate on putting words and pictures out there. But I want it as easy as me making an Instagram post or sending a Telegram/WhatsApp message.