External blogs with WordPress · Indie Microblogging
Follow @manton on Micro.blog.
Indie Microblogging<br>by Manton Reece
External blogs with WordPress
“As the web becomes more and more of a part of our every day lives, it would be a horrible tragedy if it was locked up inside of companies and proprietary software.” — Matt Mullenweg
Micro.blog is essentially a sort of aggregator. It downloads feeds of posts hosted on Micro.blog or on external blogging platforms, then merges those posts into a timeline experience for following users and sending replies. Because it’s based on standards, you don’t have to use Micro.blog to host your blog.
WordPress is used by over a third of websites on the internet. It’s had a huge influence on blogging and it improves regularly. Because if its popularity, we’ll use WordPress as an example for thinking about how Micro.blog connects with external blogs. This section will go through the basics of microblogging with WordPress, although many of the tips here are just as applicable to other blogging systems.
Short posts
Everything starts with short posts. Without short posts, there’s no “micro” in microblogging. While there’s no formal rule for how long a post should be, I’ve found that 200-300 characters is a good guideline. It’s short enough that it encourages quick posts, but long enough to fit a full thought with proper punctuation.
We intentionally started with 280 characters for Micro.blog. It’s double the original 140-character limit from Twitter. Any limit is arbitrary, so I liked picking a number that is symbolic of the move beyond Twitter.
After Micro.blog launched, Twitter also increased their limit to 280 characters. And even later, Micro.blog standardized on 300 characters, a nicer “rounded up” number.
If you want to continue to post to Twitter / X, Mastodon, Bluesky, or Threads, it’s useful to keep those limits in mind while writing. I keep most of my indie microblog posts within 300 characters so that they cleanly cross-post elsewhere. But when I feel constrained by the limit, I don’t hesitate to go over. It’s more important to me that I get a full thought posted than to stay within the limit.
No titles
In most modern blogging platforms including WordPress, the first thing you see when starting a new post is the title field. If you know exactly what you’re going to write about, maybe it’s fine to start with the title. But for many people, just picking a title is a kind of burden. It’s another opportunity for a choice, which means it’s an opportunity to give up before finishing the post.
Part of indie microblogging is getting back to the simplicity of title-less posts. When you’re writing a microblog post in WordPress, just leave the title blank, and if necessary update the WordPress theme to not include the title in HTML or the RSS feed.
You may find that some feed readers don’t gracefully handle posts without titles, often inserting “Untitled” for the title because they expect something to be there. If you see this, the best solution is to email the developer and ask for them to address it. Working around the issue with fake titles — dates, numbers, or portions of the text — will only ensure that client developers never improve their apps to handle title-less posts.
For WordPress, there are also work-arounds to keep using clean feeds without titles while still showing titles on your web site or in WP Admin. Colin Walker wrote a WordPress script that shows the date/time in WP Admin, to make it easier to manage posts.
Adding your feed
WordPress includes an RSS feed at /feed/. Add this feed to your Micro.blog account by clicking Account → Edit Feeds & Cross-posting:
Micro.blog uses the feeds on your account to build the timeline of posts that will be shown to your followers. When you post to your blog, the post is added is added to your feed, which Micro.blog then reads and adds to the timeline.
Post formats
Newer versions of WordPress have the concept of post formats. Normal blog posts have a “Standard” format, but there are also these types: Aside, Image, Link, Quote, Status, and others.
While not all themes support post formats, most of the default themes do. If you’re using a common WordPress theme, chances are good that it has basic support for “Status” or “Aside” already.
It might be tempting to embrace all the post formats — for example, using the “Image” format when posting a photo to your microblog — but that adds some complexity that won’t be well-supported in most tools. To keep things simple, use “Standard” for longer posts with titles, and “Status” or “Aside” for all your microblog posts: short posts and photo posts. You can always introduce additional formats later when you’re comfortable with the basics.
(Ready for more advanced post types? The IndieWeb-friendly Post Kinds plugin from...