Indiewebcamp sign at the fence to the Tollwerk building

Today I used the Activitypub Plugin by @pfefferle to make this website a part of the fediverse.

For example, you now can follow my blog on Mastodon by searching for "@blog@webrocker.de", and you should receive my posts directly in your home stream.
The implementation was fairly easy, I only had some initial issues with the webfinger-URL-redirect, but once that was sorted out, it worked.

But it took me the better part of the afternoon to figure out how the avatar image and header image are supposed to work when the whole site, not a specific author, is the "actor".

The plugin tries to use the "website icon" or "custom logo" for the avatar, and a "custom header" image for the header image. Both images are set with "theme options" via the customizer.

Since I use a homegrown theme here, I never needed the customizer and those options didn't exist, so the fediverse profile fell back to using a default "WordPress" icon for the avatar, and uses no header image.

In the meantime I added the options to my theme, and now have a custom logo and custom header image, but it seems that Mastodon has a very long lasting cache. Although updates to my posts are updated in the timeline immediatly, the profile infos are not.

So, for now I'll sit back and see if and when "my" avatar and desired header image will finally show up in the profile.

In fact, this post here is another try to get the info to sync. :-)