I’ve seen a fair amount of discussion about using Wordpress in a IndieWeb fashion[footnote title=“…”]Much of the below will probably sound like gibberish if you are unfamiliar with IndieWeb[/footnote]. I set up my self-hosted Wordpress site in January and for my own benefit I thought I’d document the Plugins I’m using. I’d also be interested in feedback on how I could improve it. I really had no idea what I was doing when I set this up.
Plugins I Set up Specifically for IndieWeb
- Activate Update Services
- This plugin carries a warning that it has not been tested with the past 3 major Wordpress versions. My blog is hosted on my multisite Wordpress installation which for some unknown reason removes the ability to configure a host to ping. See this for reference.
- Disable Emojis
- Probably bad form to start the list with one that is arguably not IndieWeb oriented but totally required. In spite of the name what this plugin does is enable real emojis in Wordpress posts (otherwise Wordpress replaces emojis with crappy images that look like they were created 20 years ago or so)
- IndieAuth
- I installed this so I have the option of posting from Quill. It turns my Wordpress into an IndieAuth authorization endpoint. I recently listened to a podcast from David Shanske about this.
- IndieWeb
- Helps you establish your IndieWeb identity by extending the user profile to provide rel-me and h-card fields and optionally adding widgets to display these. It also links to a number of other useful plugins (you can choose if you want any of those or not).
- JetPack
- Another plugin that is arguably not IndieWeb related but properly processing markdown syntax is mandatory IMO and this does it well. It has a ton of other features that I don’t use.
- Micropub
- I installed this to enable Quill. It implements the open API standard that is used to create posts on one’s own domain using third-party clients.
- Semantic-Linkbacks
- Does just what the name implies: it provides semantic linkbacks for WebMentions, Trackbacks and Pingbacks
- WebMention
- Another plugin that does what it says adding WebMention support to Wordpress
- WebSub/PubSubHubbub
- An implementation of the WebHub spec for letting the world know when my blog is updated.
- XML-RPC OC (I got directly from Colin Walker)
- Without this plugin posts sent to my blog via XML-RPC can’t be commented on. The OC stands for “Open Comments” which is exactly what it does
Other Plugins I’m Using
- Aksimet Anti-spam (pretty standard)
- Broken Link Checker
- I installed this when I imported posts from one of my old Wordpress sites and wanted to try to clean up or remove broken links in those posts[footnote title=“…”]there were a lot[/footnote]. I’ve left it running. I may disable it soon because it generates false alerts.
- Inline Footnotes
- I use this to include asides, snide comments, or additional detail on longer blog posts without cluttering up the main flow of the text. There are a couple in this post.
- Ultimate Category Excluder
- This plugin allows me to identify certain post types that should not be published outside my blog. E.g. a post with an excluded category won’t be sent to Micro.blog or Twitter. For my longer posts[footnote title=“…”]like this one[/footnote] I prefer to hand-craft and post a separate short/micro-blog entry letting folks know.
- UpdraftPlus - Backup/Restore (free version)
- Backs up my Wordpress files to the Cloud
- Wordfence Security (free version)
- Provides a level of protection for the site as well as notifications of suspicious activity.