Over the past year I’ve repeatedly tested things, using this blog as a test bed or sand box. That’s not ideal. Sometimes things break, when I’ve tinkered with a plugin to the point of causing the entire site to not load. Now that I intend to try out a few other things, that e.g. are theme related, and rummaging around under the hood of some plugins, I find I need a sand box. When I saw Neil at IndieWebCamp Utrecht use a test WP instance, I realised I needed to do that too, launch a test instance.
Or rather two. So I can let them talk to each other. And can compare different set-ups.
Thus came into being Proto and Meso, both residing on a subdomain.
If you want to test things IndieWeb related, feel free to use some of my postings on these test sites as a target for WebMentions.
Neil, Rosemary and Frank all have test instances too, so we now have a small network of test sites to bounce Webmention and AP messages around in.
Want to be part of the IndieTestWeb sand box network? You can, simply ping me with the URL where it resides, and I’ll provide you a list of existing sand boxes others maintain.
This is an interesting idea! I must admit I have the bad habit of just treating my blog as an ongoing experiment, and making nearly all changes “live” and on the fly. Perhaps I should put that .dev domain I convinced myself I needed to good use?
Continuing Peter’s work on hooking up FreshRSS with Drupal to “like” posts, I wanted to do the same on my WordPress site. Knowing nothing about FreshRSS nor WordPress, and unable to peer into the FreshRSS database (the .sqlite file is encrypted?), I went the route (lol) less travelled by, and coded a FreshRSS plugin. Hey, turns out I didn’t need much MVC framework, once I grokked how the CustomCSS plugin worked.
I’m too tired to include a full walkthrough, because I’ve been at this since 8am. Here’s the code on Github. I had to hack FreshRSS so that it fired a hook after a successful “favourite”. I also noticed that poetry wasn’t showing up well on FreshRSS because of a workaround from five years ago, so I submitted my first blogging-related pull request.
After reading Ton’s description of setting up a network of test sites, I did my debugging on a pair of test subdomains. The sites that have been “Liking” each other all day are Crowley and Aziraphale.