After dipping my toes into the Fediverse for the past few months, I wanted the Jetpack plugin to be there to help bloggers who wanted to interact more with the Fediverse on their sites.
Jetpack includes Sharing buttons that can be handy for your readers to quickly share your posts to their Social Network of choice ; adding a Mastodon button seemed like a no-brainer!
The Jetpack plugin comes with a number of blocks and editor extensions. One of those features extends the existing Media blocks, and adds an option to find and upload images from Google Photos or Pexels:
While this can be super useful when you use Google Photos or need to find free stock photos for your posts, you may sometimes prefer to only see the default “Media Library” option.
I don’t talk about work too often, but this time I have to share this :) Automattic has a series of interviews, all available on YouTube, where you can discover different Automatticians, what motivates them, and what they do every day.
I was interviewed back in December, and talked a bit about what I do, and why I like working at Automattic. As I said in the video, if you’ve thought about applying in the past but haven’t done it yet, give it a try! You have nothing to lose :)
You’ve probably heard about Jetpack’s new Ads module: it allows you to insert ads in your posts, in your sidebar, and in the header of your WordPress site without having to worry about finding the right ad network, managing ad inventory, or worrying about the quality of the ads. It’s available to Jetpack Premium and Professional users.
To use the feature, all you have to do is to click on the toggle under the Jetpack menu in your dashboard. Jetpack takes care of the rest.
However, sometimes you may not be happy with the default placement of the in-post ads: they appear right below the post content. That’s great, but sometimes you may be using other plugins to insert elements in there, like sharing buttons, related posts, subscription forms, …
The code snippet below will allow you to move the ad box exactly where you want it to appear.
Unison is a great little tool to synchronize files between your local machine and a remote server. It’s free, open-source, and cross-platform. I use it every day to develop Jetpack. However, until very recently I couldn’t use it to work with files on this very site. I’m hosted with Webfaction, a great hosting provider for developers who want flexibility without having to deal with server administration. A lot of packages are already installed and configured on my server for me. Unison is not available by default, so I had to install it myself. Luckily, Webfaction lets you do that!
Jetpack’s Photon module is a free image CDN that doesn’t require any configuration; as soon you activate it, all the images in your posts and pages will be downloaded, optimized, cached, and served from WordPress.com’s CDN. Magic!
Photon is applied to all images on your site, including images that may hosted somewhere else; if you one day added an image to one of your posts without actually uploading it to your Media Library, that image will be served through Photon too.
However, sometimes you’d rather not serve external images through Photon. After all, these images may already be served via another CDN! Luckily, Jetpack includes a filter to allow you to control which images get served by Photon. In the example below, we’ll only use Photon for images belonging to our site, and make sure none of the images that are not hosted on our site get processed by Photon.
When sharing posts on Facebook, you may have realized that sometimes you can play a video right on Facebook, without having to click and go to another site.
This is possible thanks to Open Graph Meta Tags. When you share a post on Facebook, or when Jetpack Publicize publishes a post to your Facebook page, Facebook crawls the page and looks for Open Graph meta tags in the head to build a complete post preview. That post preview will often include an image, a title, a description, and sometimes a video like on the screenshot above.
Jetpack automatically creates these Open Graph Meta tags for you unless you already use another Open Graph plugin, in which case we let the other plugin handle things.
New week, new plugin! ?
This is once again a Jetpack add-on, and it’s also another good example of the things you can accomplish with the WordPress.com REST API: Post Views for Jetpack pulls data about your site’s stats, as well as stats for each one of your posts.
This is still a work in progress; I would love to know what you’d like in this plugin, and where you would like to display those post views. Open a new thread in the support forums to let me know!
I’ve talked about the WordPress.com REST API on this blog before. I even created a plugin allowing you to make use of it on your own site. This API powers WordPress.com, the desktop WordPress.com apps, and is used in more and more areas of the Jetpack plugin.
Did you know that API also allows you to manage your Custom Post Types via the WordPress.com interface?
When I set up my new machine, I decided to get rid of MAMP and Vagrant, my previous local development tools of choice. While they worked well for me, I needed something a bit different. I need to be able to spin up a fresh installation of WordPress, run a few tests, and burn it all down a few minutes later.
A few months ago, I discovered Laravel Valet. Valet is a tool relying on Caddy and Dnsmasq, allowing you to spin up PHP projects in a few seconds. You can learn more about it here. It seemed like the perfect tool for me, so I decided to combine it with WP-CLI to quickly launch WordPress sites on my laptop.