408 – Bringing Bluesky and WordPress together with Daniel Post’s Autoblue plugin

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You have reached episode number 408 entitled, bringing Bluesky and WordPress, together with Daniel Post's Autoblue Plugin.

It was published on Thursday the sixth of Feb, 2025.

My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we join Daniel to talk about Bluesky and Autoblue, a few bits of housekeeping.

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Okay, what have we got for you today? Well, I've got a brand new post over on the wpbuilds.com website. It's Daniel Post. Okay. I've given you a moment to get over the incredible burst of laughter that you got there, at my fantastic joke.

Daniel Post has something really terrific that he's gonna talk about today, and it's to do with WordPress and it's also to do with Bluesky. He has a new plugin, it's called Autoblue, and it helps you bind your website to the increasingly popular Bluesky social network.

Bluesky, in many ways, resembles X. It really does look like it. It feels like it, but as of this moment, there's no algorithm interrupting your feed, and there's also no advertising. So at the moment, it's a pretty nice place to be. I'm really making use of it.

But wouldn't it be nice if you could combine your WordPress website with your Bluesky account? Well, you can. And Daniel's Autoblue plugin will help that to happen.

He explains how it's all built. What the constraints are on what you can and can't do. And I think if you're interested in exploring new social media options, Bluesky and Autoblue is a really fantastic combination.

So here comes the podcast and I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast today by Daniel Post. Hello Daniel?

[00:04:37] Daniel Post: Hi. I'm excited to be here. Thank you for having

[00:04:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. I think I could be wrong. I think this is Daniel's first podcast. Is that right? I.

[00:04:45] Daniel Post: That's, yeah, very correct. I'm a little nervous, but excited.

[00:04:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. As, I'm sure you'll agree by the, time we get to the end of this, I'm sure your nerves will have evaporated. It is just a conversation. But we've got Daniel on the podcast today to talk about. the thing which is hot at the moment, which is a Bluesky, if you haven't come across a Bluesky, it is, a new social network.

to say it's new is actually not quite. True, but it's definitely gained in popularity in the recent months. and Daniel has some offerings in the blue skies and WordPress space. We'll get onto that in a moment. Daniel, for a minute or so, would you just tell us a little bit about yourself, just your background with WordPress, where you've worked, what you do for a living now, that kind of thing, as long or as short as you wish to make it.

[00:05:34] Daniel Post: Absolutely. Yeah. so I'm Daniel. I'm from Amsterdam. I've been working with WordPress for over 12 years now. I think actually started in high school when I was 17, with theme forest theme. So I started out making like premium themes and selling those. they looked quite all right. The coat was awful, but.

It was, very enjoyable. It was my start into WordPress. from there I started doing some freelancing, went to university, just like a little bit of freelancing on the site. After university, I joined a, an agency in Amsterdam. like a pretty standard web agency making WordPress sites for small, medium businesses.

when I was at, the agency, my wife got a master's. She got accepted to a master's program in Dublin. So we were supposed to go to Dublin. so I quit my job figuring I could do freelancing for a couple months, give it, another shot before we, before I'd have to quit my job anyway, to move to Dublin.

that was early 2020, so then Covid happened and none of that happened. So I just had quit my job. I was just freelancing and I figured, you know what? Let's see how this goes and see how long I can stick it out. And. It went well. in 2021, I built a plugin that maybe you've heard of, social Image generator.

yeah, I built that. I got a good reception. I got lucky, like CSS strip started using it in some other companies. and then it was picked up by automatic pretty quickly after I released it and me with it. So that's how I joined Automatic. I worked at Automatic for just under two years and then.

Decided to leave because I wanted to try my own thing again and build my own product, and that's where we are now. I'm doing a combination of freelancing client project and trying to build my own WordPress plugin.

[00:07:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Alright, thank you. And the, product that we're gonna talk about today, there's obviously all of the things that Daniel has been doing, but the product that we're gonna really focus on today is called Autoblue. And, I'm gonna suggest that you do the following. Listen to this URL, then pause the podcast.

Go and have a good poke around the site. Familiarize yourself with it and then come back and on pause. So it's Autoblue. So as you would imagine, A-U-T-O-B-L-U-E, and then the ending is do ccc. So it's two Cs. I've never seen that before. Actually. I don't know what is, it makes me think of credit card or something like that.

I don't know.

[00:08:05] Daniel Post: Yeah, I, just saw it and I, thought it looked cool. I didn't really put a lot of thought into it. There, there is actually a domain that will be perfect, which is Autoblue. it's also a $5,000 a year, so maybe, if, things pick up, if I get a sponsor, maybe. But it seemed a bit steep to

[00:08:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that does seem as a startup, that kind of money can be spent better elsewhere. So let me do that once more. So it's Autoblue cc, go check that out and then come back. so let's assume that you've done that and you're back. Welcome back. And, so what is it? Do you just wanna give us the sort of elevator pitch for what it is and then we'll get into the details.

We'll talk about Bluesky, the social network and the hopes for the future of this plugin.

[00:08:46] Daniel Post: Yeah, absolutely. It's a, WordPress plugin, and my idea with it is to bring Bluesky to WordPress and WordPress to Bluesky. So one half of that is whenever you share a WordPress post and you publish one. You can automatically also share it to Bluesky. You can set your message, you can pick an image, and then it'll post to your Bluesky account automatically without you having to do it manually after you publish your post.

that's WordPress to Bluesky. And then the Bluesky to WordPress part is that I'm bringing in likes and replies on your Bluesky post and displaying them on your WordPress post. So if you've shared a new blog article that you've just written and someone comments on Bluesky. Talk, replying to it or engaging with it, and you can then display that engagement on your WordPress website.

and the cool thing there is that WordPress comments, they exist. I don't get many, I don't think a lot of people get many Bluesky, social media. It's a lot easier for people to engage with the barrier. barrier to entry basically is a lot lower. it's much easier to like a post or just say this is a great article, or ask a question about it.

the downside there is that it's all fleeting. It disappears after a while. if you're browsing through your social media, recent posts, you don't see news articles or blog posts from months ago. Whereas, especially with blogs, like a lot of the content is either evergreen or at least, still relevant months later.

and this way you can still surface that engagement that the post got and discussion that there was about it on your website, even after it's long been forgotten on social media.

[00:10:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that's really important and under underrated in a way in that, so we're talking about the Bluesky to WordPress to Bluesky, all of that kind of thing, and it really feels like a decade or more, I. Ago, the comments on a WordPress website were actually useful and I know that there are some properties out there that get boatloads of comments.

There's people that go there. So there are newspapers in the uk for example, that publish with WordPress. And an hour after the, article has been published, you go there and there's five or 600 comments. So comments are not dead. But if you are a typical website owner. They are. Social networks came along.

They just made that whole game easier. you'd drop in a link, it would take the featured image, it would give you some idea of what the post was like, and, all the conversation got captured over there for good or ill. That's what happened. And so this idea of. Putting things onto your WordPress website.

but they're handled, if you like, from the social network side, the Bluesky side. That seems like a really powerful feature. we'll get to that in a minute, but I just wanna talk about Bluesky for a moment and maybe the, and I'm gonna do air quotes, which I am doing right now. the luck that you may have had in the timing of things.

Here because Bluesky seems to be taking off. We are recording this late December, 2024 and we seem to be in this period of rapid growth for Bluesky. I dunno if you've got any numbers on that, but it's, I think it's fair to say that one year ago, only the nerd in nerds in the tech press knew anything about it.

Now it seems Almost everybody that I know has heard the words, even if they haven't created an account, and then it feels like slowly but surely everybody is getting an account. Is that true? Am I over egging it or does it seem to be experiencing precipitous growth at the minute?

[00:12:22] Daniel Post: No, I think that's correct. I think they've passed 20 million users recently. It might be up to 25 million now. And it's definitely been, the past couple weeks has been a lot. I think not to get into politics, but I think since US election, it's been like a gigantic climb.

[00:12:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Yeah. the rival social network, if you like, which Bluesky really does look like X, that, that's, so maybe for political reasons, which we don't need to get into, that maybe has taken a bit of a hiatus. And people have decided that they wanna move elsewhere, and Bluesky seems to be the place that they've landed.

and it really does look and feel like it's rival X in many ways. When you log into the web app, if you like it, you really would be forgiven for thinking you are still on x. It almost everything is laid out in the exact same way. the colors are slightly different and what have you, but everything looks really familiar.

So it's taken off, but it also seems to have taken off. importantly where other networks have failed. It seems to have taken off with a certain niche of people who I feel like if you want the platform to succeed, you need to get some, I don't know, some weight behind it. And people like journalists you were mentioning before we hit record, journalists seem to be moving over there.

News organizations and what have you, and, it feels like that's a milestone once people start blogging about it or, the journalists are talking about it within the platform itself, then it has this kind of critical mass and, off it goes. and we seem to be in that at the moment, 20 million users obviously, compare that to Facebook or x it's not a lot, but it's a, steady climb.

And, I, I feel like that's set to continue into 2025. What do you think?

[00:14:12] Daniel Post: I would think so. you never know, but I think one important thing here that like maybe mastered on never quite got to, is that a lot of people that people want to follow have switched over. if you have, you can have a very vibrant, very active niche community or tech community on the social network.

And that's, it's really nice, it's, a good way to interact with people in your community, in your niche. but it's not really gonna cause people to move over in big numbers. Whereas if you have, you have these journalists, you have these celebrities like, people that other people want to follow, because, Nobody really wants to follow us that much outside of, our own communities. But like big pop stars or famous journalists, people wanna follow them. So when they start moving over to a different platform, I feel like that's automatically gonna bring a lot of people over with them. And that's how I see how it's gonna keep growing.

but again, you never know, but it seems like there's some kind of critical mass there right now.

[00:15:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think you're right. And, what's the promise of Bluesky? I've just been describing it as looking very similar to Twitter or sorry, X and if that's the case, why, do people even bother? What, is the difference? What's the sort of underpinnings, the philosophy, if you like, behind it, which has attracted people Because, if it's just a clone of another social network, why bother?

[00:15:46] Daniel Post: it's interesting 'cause Bluesky actually started as a research project within. Twitter Beck, when was still Twitter. it spun off into its own thing. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was on the board for a while. he's not anymore, but it's very much, it started within Twitter as a way to research and see if they could decentralize Twitter some way.

and now it's become its own thing and it's, it is very, like you said, it's it basically looks like a quote of Twitter. And when I switch, because I switched from X Twitter to Bluesky and I just, what I did is I replaced the app on my phone and sometimes I just wasn't sure which one I was in.

'cause it's so similar. and I think people are just switching over because they're tired of X and the way things are going there right now and they're looking for alternatives and Bluesky and that seems sense. Seems like a really. Good. Similar alternative, with a lot of the same appeal.

it is, there is a promise of decentralization. It's not quite decentralized. Now, I think that's important for a small group of people. I don't think, the general public cares that much about whether or not their social media is decentralized. But it is nice that the Bluesky team is very much, has a strong focus on it and they are like actively working on making it more decentralized.

I.

[00:17:10] Nathan Wrigley: I think if, memory serves. I think before, I don't know, maybe a couple of years ago, maybe it was longer than that, Jack Dorsey, the founder of. Twitter, who also was the key mover in the philosophy of getting Bluesky started. I think he said that if he had his time again, he would've made Twitter not a platform.

He would've made it a protocol. He, his idea looking back was that he wished it had been a, protocol instead of an actual platform. And, essentially that's what. That's what Bluesky is. That is the difference, right? Underlying it all. Obviously you go to a web app and you're not really thinking protocol.

You're thinking Bluesky X, I'm just using this thing. But underneath it all, there is some thing going on to surface what you want. And I think one of the things that people have become, discouraged with, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. Is that they feel that their attention is maybe being gamed a little bit by an algorithm and the algorithm who knows what the incentive is.

But some parts of me feels the incentive has to be to keep you there to surface things, which ensure that, the longer you are here, I. The, more ad dollars we can make, because you are gonna encounter ads between posts and what have you. You may click on those ads and the revenue will go up and I'm, guessing, although I haven't really done too much research, I'm guessing that has been stripped out of Bluesky.

So the algorithm isn't trying to keep you there, it's just trying to surface the people that you followed in a chronological order. Have I, got that wrong, or is that about right?

[00:18:48] Daniel Post: Yeah, that's about right. There is an algorithm on Bluesky, that's a part that they offer, but there's a whole, like the actual Bluesky app and the whole underlying protocol is all open source. so Bluesky is built on something called the Authenticated Transfer Protocol, or at Proto, which is also developed by the Bluesky Team.

Basically, like they, they've been like spearheading all this. They've been developing it, at all, but they're building it in such a way that it's open and other people can use it, can consume, it, can spin off their own, versions of it. So the way it works is you have, this thing called a PDS or Personal Data Server.

which hosts users and their information, being all their posts and people they follow. Bluesky hosts their own gigantic PDS, which has all the Bluesky users, that's all the people with the, B sky.social username. Those are all hosted by Bluesky and now they've slowly started allowing other people to also run their own PDS.

So they're experimenting with it still. So you can, it's limited to maximum of 10 users per PDS right now. But what you can do if you wanted to, is you could start your own server and run your own version of their software that sets up, turns your server into a PDS, and then you can host your own user account and all your posts there on your own PDS.

And then the actual Bluesky app and the, website are called an app view. which consume information from all these different PDSs. So right now it's basically just Bluesky, the Bluesky app, consuming the Bluesky PDS. But you can have your own PDS and tell the Bluesky team, Hey, this is mine, can you add it to your app?

but that also means that, like right now it's pretty centralized. 'cause pretty much everything lives on the Bluesky PDS, but the, way they're thinking of it and they're visioning it, is that eventually. Larger entities and larger, companies or nonprofits or whatever, also have their own PDSs.

So you can imagine, let's say the New York Times having their own PDS and all their journalists have an account on that PDS, and then you could consume that information from that PDS within the Bluesky app, but also anywhere else you could build your own apps that like, have all that information.

I, don't know if that makes

[00:21:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that does make sense. But can, I drill down to it? Because sometimes these things, they're hard to get the first time around. So let's just delve into that. So I'll repeat back to you what I think you said, and then you can confirm or deny that I've understood it correctly. So we've got this PDS, which is an acronym for Personal Data Server.

And at the moment for expediency for growing the platform, Bluesky has basically decided. Okay, we will run the PDS and we'll just get this network up and running with our PDS. And everybody's data, everybody's posts, everybody's profile information, what have you will be in there. But the de decentralization bit is in the future.

And obviously you're saying it's rolling out now with this limited. 10 user account. PDSI could say, okay, I want a WP builds PDSI then control that data so all the posts are, hosted by me, and if I lose that, it's lost. If it gets deleted, it's gone. And that's on me. But I can then bind that to the Bluesky network.

So the in effect. If I was on Bluesky.social, my PDS, your PDS, anybody else's, the New York Times PDS, I would be able to see everything as a user, and I would not really know. Maybe there's something in the interface to give that away, but in terms of the posts themselves, I wouldn't really know where that information was being held.

It would just all come my way. But it's decentralized. It gives people that ownership of that. And then presumably. From that, it gives me portability. It gives me the idea in the future to say, do you know what? I don't want the Bluesky Social Platform to have my data. I'd like to export that, bring it into mine.

I'll have ownership. And then in two years time, when I get fed up paying the hosting bill for that, I'm just gonna take it straight back Bluesky. I can do that. So that's what I think you said. Did I get that about right?

[00:23:06] Daniel Post: Yeah, I think that's pretty much correct and I, do have to, to say I'm also not the Bluesky expert. This is just my understanding of how it all works. and I think another benefit there is that like Bluesky is not the only app that could do this. That, if there's all these different PDSs, than somebody else, if they say, okay, Bluesky, the Bluesky team is not.

doing what we want to do or, whatever. Like they could start their own social media app or website that consumes information from all these different PDFs and you can essentially make a blues cl clone or, a different version. So that kind of, that, there's, with normal centralized social media, there's no way to create a Facebook alternative and have all the Facebook data on there and all the posts and all the people.

It's just not possible. And this way it is possible, except for right. right now the fact that the, one main PDS is also owned by Blue

Sky.

[00:24:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. But hopefully, let's assume that the people running Bluesky have got the intentions that, that you've just described. Hopefully in the future, once they've ironed out the kinks and all of these different PDSs have. Proven, okay. That technology now works. We're pretty confident.

Then it can be rolled out to larger examples and eventually limitless. And, honestly, I feel like we have the audience which get that, like we have WordPress websites, we want to own the content. That we put out there. That's the reason we're using WordPress, because we wanna be in charge of it when we want to be able to migrate it.

If the hosting platform goes down, or, we find them unreliable. So I, think, I'm hoping that the, WordPress lot will totally get that. You could be building your website on Squarespace or Wix if you wanted, but you've chosen WordPress for. A bunch of reasons. And it seems like Bluesky has got that taken care of.

now one other nice little feature, which I thought I'd mention is that if you own domains, which literally everybody running, WordPress must at some point have gone to a domain registrar and register a domain, but I'm guessing most of the people out in the world will not have. That's a neat little feature in Bluesky.

A domain that you own can become your permanent handle. So in my case, you could [email protected] or daniel post.com or nathan wrigley.com or whatever it may be. And all that you do is change one text. you add a text record into your DNS settings and it gets verified. And I just think that's a, neat little feature.

It, enables you to. I don't know, prevent that whole thing on Twitter X where you want this particular, name, you want the name of your company, but somebody bagged it years ago, and so you've got to go for something with 3 7 4 at the end or something. That's a really neat little feature and maybe something that most people didn't know was out there.

[00:25:59] Daniel Post: It is, yeah, it's actually one of my favorite, like smaller features of Bluesky. And it's not just nice, it's also, it serves as a, like a, and again, like somewhat decentralized verification surface because you can trust that if you're interacting with [email protected] Bluesky account, that it's you and not, somebody else pretending to be WP Builds.

and. to get back to the New York Times, they've actually started rolling out this thing where they give all their journalists their name.new York times.com handle. So then, you know for sure, oh, that's an actual New York Times journalist I'm interacting with and not someone pretending to be.

And it's it's it's both really nice and verification at the same time. So I, yeah, I think it's really

cool.

[00:26:46] Nathan Wrigley: it's just one of those little quality of life improvements that, just, it's just something a little bit different and, again, it just demonstrates the thoughtfulness being put into this. Okay. So I think we've done a fairly good job of describing what Bluesky is. If you haven't been there, just go and Google.

Bluesky and presumably you'll be able to go in, log in, set up an account. I've gotta say, actually, if you do, you'll be very happy if you're a word presser because it feels like the, migration from for WordPresses has been more or less complete. there may be a few people who are holding out, but I feel at the moment the WordPress community has either decided to go.

Over to Bluesky or is maintaining both. but certainly a lot of the people that I'm following have now moved over to Bluesky and seem to be interacting over there. and probably for all the reasons that we described, the non algorithmic feed and what have you. So go and check it out.

Let's get onto Autoblue. You described in, bare bones what it does. I'm keen to know how it does it. So you mentioned that, that presumably you are some way calling an API, which exists within Bluesky. I'm not sure exactly how it works. Feel free to be a little bit technical. obviously we can't go into the thick of it too much, but how does it work?

What's it doing? What kind of stuff have you built so far?

[00:28:05] Daniel Post: Yeah. So it's, it is using the API, and Bluesky actually has a very nice API. So there's two different APIs. There's one for interacting with Bluesky itself, and there's one for interacting with their PDS, which also means that if if you are self-hosting, you can interact with that PDS the same way.

so what I'm doing is whenever you share a post, or you publish a post on your WordPress website, there's the option to say, okay, I want to share this to my Bluesky account. And you can type out a little message, and you pick an image and then behind the scenes, that just makes an API request to Bluesky.

It's authenticated 'cause you've already connected your account in the Autoblue settings page before, and it basically just sends off the, the, message and the image and the link to your post to Bluesky and then it get gets posted on your Bluesky profile. Then from that API request, I get the link back to that Bluesky post, and then I use that to make another API call to get all the replies to, to that Bluesky post.

And then those can get displayed on your website and those get refreshed right now every five minutes. but you can change that. And that's, it's the API is very nice and it's been easy, very easy to use. one thing actually I do want to add as well is to get back in the domain verification, there's two ways to verify your domain.

You can either update a DNS record or you can upload a text file that has your, Bluesky unique identifier in it to verify that, okay, you own this domain. and I'm planning on adding a. Button in Autoblue that just says, okay, you've, you've verified your account. This is your domain. Do you want to use it as your handle?

And then by pressing that button, it's just gonna update, upload that text file for you. And then Blues Sky sees, okay, this is a verified domain. So for people who have their own domain but don't want to, change their DNS settings, or they don't know how, or they don't control it, but still wanna use their domain as their handle, they can just press the button and then it should also be verified.

[00:30:14] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[00:30:14] Daniel Post: I think that'll be a neat little feature as well.

[00:30:16] Nathan Wrigley: That's really neat. So you upload a text file somewhere, like the root of your WordPress website, I dunno where the location is, but somewhere significant. and, then from that moment on, you're also verified. Okay. And that that is most people who have a WordPress website, most

people don't, don't develop or anything, they have no idea what DNS is.

And so that's just a step too far. That's a cool feature. yeah,

[00:30:39] Daniel Post: it's also like you said, like everyone with a WordPress website is gonna have a domain, and a lot of them will probably want to use that domain. So it feels like there's a,

[00:30:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you've taken the friction out, haven't you? You've just made that little one step easier. Okay. Again, I'm gonna, I'm gonna rip apart what you said earlier and just to make sure that I've got it right. okay. I've installed the plugin, I've configured it, and you can maybe describe what configuration options are there at the minute and what you're hoping to have in the future.

I've configured it. I go to write a blog post, I hit publish and then. I'm doing this in the Gutenberg editor. Let's just work with

[00:31:09] Daniel Post: Yeah, correct.

[00:31:10] Nathan Wrigley: and beneath that, on the right hand side is some sort of meta box if you like. And this your Autoblue ticker box basically saying, okay, post this to Bluesky.

I hit publish. I. Over it goes, type in the text and what have you, and then, and then at that point you are getting something back from the API, which binds the comments into it. And so every five minutes by default, but presumably you could increase that or decrease that depending on how you want to do it.

If somebody, now this is the important bit, if somebody creates a reply in on my website, so wp builds.com, if somebody writes a reply there. It goes to Bluesky and if somebody writes a reply on Bluesky, it comes back to my comments. Is that how it's working? Is it like this two-way sinking thing or have I misunderstood?

[00:32:02] Daniel Post: Right now it's one way sinking. So Bluesky replies and likes are coming into your website. I am trying to figure out how to, if I, if two way is possible and how to do that. Because if, know for someone to leave a regular WordPress comment on your website and then have it appear on Blue

[00:32:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's not possible,

is

[00:32:22] Daniel Post: they would have to authenticate their Bluesky account.

Or it would all come through from your accounts, on their behalf, which both I think are not ideal. so I'm I'm still like playing around with it, like figuring out what the best way to do it. Because it also might be nice to have a combination of both, Bluesky rip comments and regular comments.

And then on the website differentiate. say this reply was from Bluesky and then you can click on it to go to the actual Bluesky host.

[00:32:53] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,

[00:32:53] Daniel Post: to figure out how to, best do it. 'cause it's very much an alpha version Right now. I'm, I'm trying to figure out what's the best approach, what would people like the most, 'cause there's many ways you can go with it.

[00:33:06] Nathan Wrigley: I have an app on my phone and I'm just gonna open it up and it's called, now, what is it called? Let me just get this right. It's called, I think it's called Open Vine or something like that. Open Vibe. It's called, I don't have you come across this, so

[00:33:19] Daniel Post: heard of it. I don't actually know what

[00:33:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's on, I've got an Android phone and it's called Open Vibe.

I'll link to it in the show notes. And, it enables you to, post, to Mastodon, to threads, to Ssta and to Bluesky. And, what's interesting about that is. All the different networks, they get muddled up in this one timeline. I'm imagining in the WordPress comments that you've got regular WordPress comments and you've got Bluesky comments.

And so separating those out in some way, you could obviously have, I don't know, an accordion so that they were entirely separated, but it one, one of the nice things would be to see it all chronologically. So the Bluesky comments got modeled up with the. The WordPress comments, but there was some indication to say, you know what?

This one came from Bluesky. This one came from WordPress. This is Bluesky. Is that what you're describing? So that you'd maintain that chronological feed, but you'd, muddle them all up. you'd put them all in one thread. Yeah.

[00:34:14] Daniel Post: Yeah. right now it's all separate, so it only shows Bluesky replies and then. It shows your normal comments underneath, but I do want to integrate them somehow. 'cause I think that's just the nicest experience. And then you can still pick and choose which platforms you would want.

do I just want WordPress comments? Do I just want Bluesky or do I want them both chronologically with some indicator where each one came from. And then I imagine if other plugins, 'cause I'm only doing Bluesky, but if another plugin, is doing Mastodon, then maybe you could have it all and have one big comment section.

Where it's all coming together. And then, there's some other things, there's moderation. Things like how do you wanna, when someone posts a reply, do you automatically want to put it on your website? Do you want to approve it first? if you hide it on Bluesky, does that mean it should also get hidden on your website?

There's there's some things to figure out there, what's the nicest user experience for the website owner with the least amount of work because it, it is a bit tricky,

[00:35:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, not just tricky, but it is, this is the beginning of this whole journey, isn't it? Like, I said earlier, it feels 15 years ago comments on websites were the thing. Then the social networks totally stole that. And because of utility and the ease of use, we all just surrendered.

And said, yeah, let's just all go over to these walled gardens and interact over there. And then at some point in the last 3, 4, 5 years, whatever, I think, there's this trickle of people who've said, actually, you know what? These walled gardens, they're not great for us. we can see the impact they're having in all sorts of ways, gaming our attention and so on.

And so maybe we've got this trickle. Going back towards, okay, let's decentralize, let's make it so that the comments are ours. They're open. They're not just inside the login of a Facebook app or whatever it may be. let's bring them and let's just let the world have them back. And if you've got the expertise, or in this case you download the Autoblue, PL blue plugin, then you can just, you can see all of that goodness on your website.

And that feels to me like a really nice thing. It feels like we're getting back to something that the internet had. But we all just gave away not really realizing what we were giving away. okay. we'll keep our eyes peeled. So next then Daniel is, I wanna talk about the fact that you've got.

You've got this idea that in the future, as with all WordPress plugins, there seems to be, an opportunity to raise the game a little bit, offer basic functionality for free, but also have a pro version. What are you imagining you are gonna do on the free side and what do you think you might be able to achieve on the pro side?

And I realize I'm not binding you to anything you said. If you don't pull it off, you don't pull it off. But give us an inkling of where you're gonna go with free and pro.

[00:36:54] Daniel Post: Sure. so yeah, so basically my thinking is that there's only one way for me to make this sustainable and be able to just work just on Autoblue and my plugins, it's like I would have to charge for something, unfortunately, I can't do it all for free. I do want to keep the core functionality free, so I wanna make sure that you can always just share it to Bluesky for free and show your comments, like basically everything that's there right now.

I feel like it's like a core offering of Autoblue. And that's not something I'd want to wall off ever. I think paid things, you could imagine things like multiple accounts. You're not limited to one, but you can connect multiple and then pick and choose which ones you share to, scheduling shares so you don't have to share something.

you know right when you post your board press post, but you could share it at a, better time. manual sharing or resharing if you wanted to, reshare and post that's already there. and then maybe for comments, just different display options. One thing I wanted to add is, you know, how like sometimes it says liked by X amount of people.

I think it would be really nice if you WordPress post has liked by 60 people and chose some avatars of those people. stuff like that. So basically, I haven't quite fleshed out the free versus premium offering. I just wanna make sure that the free version is still very much useful and has a lot to offer and that the premium is more like an enhancement for people who want more or just wanna support it and not okay.

The free version is really just a trial for the paid version. That's my philosophy behind it.

[00:38:34] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. That's really great to hear. Can, I ask, does the, does the Bluesky or the at, proto does the API surrounding that, does it, give you an intuition that all of that stuff is gonna be possible? Or is this roadmap territory I. For them as well. And they haven't built that into the protocol?

Or, is all of that, you mentioned for example, likes the number of likes. Is that the kind of thing that the API offers up at the moment or are you gonna have to wait until that's been built into the protocol and so on?

[00:39:04] Daniel Post: No, that's all already included. So like I, all, everything I just said I know is possible. For example, scheduled sharing, like on the at proto end, that's just me making an API request at a different time. So it's like I really just have to build all that logic on my own end. I, and they do offer account of all the likes, so you can display them with little avatars.

So like on I, there's nothing right now where I feel like I'm waiting on. Bluesky or at proto to add things. It's more, my own time. That's the limiting factor.

[00:39:39] Nathan Wrigley: Have you, had a good response? one of the things I guess from your side is that if, you're getting loads of interaction, loads of people installing the plugin or requesting the plugin, that's gonna give you, I dunno, some good feels about whether or not you should develop it and spend the time on it.

is that the case? Has it been, more of a success perhaps than you imagined or more in demand?

[00:40:03] Daniel Post: Yeah, very much Actually I was surprised. Yeah, I've been just, I've, been building it in public, so if you follow me in Bluesky, you kinda see all the different steps and the different, like ideas I have and how I approach things. And there's actually been a lot of people that's oh, I really want this, or this would be really nice to have on my own website.

it seems like people are mostly excited about the. The comments part on their website, which is also, that's something where I'm like, this is something I would really want on my own

[00:40:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:40:29] Daniel Post: So that's always, to me, that's a good sign that I'm, heading in the right direction. If it's something that I would love to use, then I'm probably not the only one there.

But yeah, the rest reception's been really good and it's very encouraging and one, one really nice thing. Off building a WordPress plugin for Bluesky is that you can do all of your marketing on Bluesky and your entire target audience.

[00:40:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's a really good point. I hadn't thought about that yet. It's kind,

[00:40:56] Daniel Post: very convenient. Yeah.

[00:40:57] Nathan Wrigley: it propels itself forward, so that's lovely. Now I noticed if I go to your website again, Autoblue cc at the top is the opportunity to download. But I also noticed that at this moment we are recording, like I said.

Late December, you are classifying it as alpha. how confident are you that the version that we've got at the moment is usable or really are you advising only edge cases don't put into production? Where are we at with that?

[00:41:26] Daniel Post: I'm pretty confident that it's good. I've been using it, people have been using it. I probably wouldn't say if, you're, a big publisher. with tons of visitors, probably don't rely on it, as your only sharing solution yet. 'cause I'm, a hundred percent sure there's edge cases that I haven't found yet.

but if it's for your personal website or a small website, yeah, I would, I'd be perfectly happy to use that myself. one thing I added recently, which I think is really nice, is a logging functionality. So if you go to the settings page, there's a. Logs tap and it tracks everything that Autoblue does.

So there's different levels you can choose that you can turn it off or you can have it log everything basically. So my thinking there is there's definitely gonna be things that are gonna go wrong. I. like an image might not get shared. like a post might not get shared. And then, people are gonna come to me and be like, Hey, my post didn't get shared.

what'd you do? and I'd be like, I don't know. So I added the logging functionality to it take keeps track of every single step that Autoblue does with all the context there. So my hope there is that if something goes wrong, I can tell people, okay, can you look at the logs for me and tell me what it says?

And then, Maybe it says there that like the image was in unsupported format that I hadn't thought of, and then I immediately have usable feedback to fix that and improve it, and make things better instead of just, trying to replicate their situation. and I think for me, when those things are gonna be, if there's a lot of people using it, but the edge cases and the logs that people share with me are very small, then I would say okay, this is, stable and very usable.

But I've, only started working on this like a little over a month ago, so

[00:43:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:43:14] Daniel Post: I would not be, yeah, it is very new. Yeah, because, yeah. 'cause you, earlier you said did I get lucky with the timing with all, the explosion of Blues Sky right now? And I, don't think it's luck. 'cause that's what I started too.

That's when I switched now, I was like, oh, I want to do stuff with this for WordPress.

[00:43:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. it's definitely captured me. Bluesky's really got my attention. It was all about Mastodon a little while ago, but I think the, I don't know, it, it plateaued. I still love the philosophy behind it. I think it's brilliant and the fact that, you can have your own server and all of that, Out the gate. Out the gate, because it's been going for that much longer. But I'm, absolutely loving the interactions on Bluesky. It, is significantly more. Interactive. When I post something on Bluesky, I do get much more interaction. Interaction. I think that's largely to do with the, fact that there's now 20 million plus people with hundreds of thousands being added every week, I would imagine.

Just one quick thing, where is the, stuff getting stored at present? So we've got these comments and what have you. Are you just pulling them via the API directly onto the website? At the moment, the. The website. Sorry, the webpage is loaded. Are they being saved in the database? Where I'm going with this is that I've recently got into, doing static websites, and obviously that takes all of the dynamic functionality of WordPress, the database and what have you.

It just takes all of that away. Is it possible with Autoblue to have comments on a static website because it's just doing an API call at that moment. or indeed it's just, I don't know, putting an I frame on there. So just run through that. Where's the data being held and can we use it on static?

[00:44:52] Daniel Post: So right now it's being held just at Bluesky and I'm pulling it in. and it's rendering with PHP on the website, so I think you could already use it with, a static plugin. I just don't know how refreshing it would work. I'm not sure how those plugins work and if you don't have to do like a new build to refresh, to see the new replies.

but like I said, I am looking into making it more cohesive with normal WordPress comments and see if I can, intertwine those and then they would get stored basically as a normal WordPress comment. but with some kind of meta information saying this came from Bluesky, as well as a link to the actual Bluesky rep reply, so you could link back to

[00:45:33] Nathan Wrigley: Got it.

[00:45:34] Daniel Post: and then it would be more intertwined with actual WordPress comments. But right now for the Alpha version, it's just coming from Bluesky directly and it's not, it's caching it, so like I save it for five minutes. So otherwise, every time someone uploads your blog post, it would be making an API request to Bluesky, which is not ideal.

So I save it for a couple minutes.

[00:45:53] Nathan Wrigley: and I guess also depending on your, the hotness of the post that you create. Let's say that, you are, I don't know, Joe Rogan or something, and you put your you put your comments. With Autoblue onto your website, and then, you write something and two minutes later you've got 6,000 replies and likes and what have you.

that, I guess you've gotta figure that bit out as well.

[00:46:15] Daniel Post: Yes. Absolutely.

[00:46:17] Nathan Wrigley: red hot. if it's me, you're fine. You could go every 10 hours and it would still be okay, but if you are one of those big influencers and you're expecting it to all work, you, you would really need it moment by moment updating, wouldn't you?

[00:46:32] Daniel Post: there's a lot of logic you can do there because a new post might need, maybe you want to update it every 10 seconds.

[00:46:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:46:40] Daniel Post: posts from a year ago, you probably don't need to update it every five minutes. you can get away with once per hour, even once per day. I will say that it's not actively or like proactively updating.

So posts that aren't being viewed are just, they're not reloading. It's only when someone views the post, then it checks okay. Like, when's the last time this was refreshed? And if it's past the five minute threshold, then it gets refreshed again. So it's not constantly doing refreshes on all of your

[00:47:07] Nathan Wrigley: Got it.

[00:47:08] Daniel Post: but I do think there's some logic there with okay, how many replies are we getting? How old is this post? And then based on that, figure out like how often we should refresh it.

[00:47:19] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Daniel, it really seems like you're having a great time with this. it seems like you've

[00:47:23] Daniel Post: I am, yeah. It's, I'm really enjoying building it. Yeah.

[00:47:26] Nathan Wrigley: it's perfect. being in, at the beginning of something, it's just so much fun, isn't it? I, know it's not the beginning of Bluesky, but honestly, I think for most people it is.

It's just, it

[00:47:35] Daniel Post: I think it is.

[00:47:35] Nathan Wrigley: beginning, And it's taking off. And so being at the. The fulcrum of that and marrying the two things that you like, that social media interaction, but also the WordPress development side of things. That's great. So once more, the URL is blues Bluesky.

That's Bluesky. Yeah. that's a different thing. Autoblue do cc, but you can Google. Bluesky to figure out where to go. Over there. Now I'm gonna, I'm gonna drop this. I always do this at the end, and I'm hoping that you are going to give a predictable response. I'm going to say, where can we find you online?

And if you give us an X handle, I'm going to be very disappointed.

[00:48:10] Daniel Post: You can find me on Bluesky, obviously, and I'm at Daniel post.com, so my own domain. Yeah.

[00:48:15] Nathan Wrigley: Daniel post.com. You can find him there. And, while you're at it, I'm at nathan wrigley.com so you can, you can find me there as well. And, yeah. Thank you so much Daniel. Hopefully lots of people will, jump ship and, start using Autoblue to put that onto their WordPress website. A pleasure chatting to you.

Thank you so much.

[00:48:34] Daniel Post: Yeah. Thank you very much. This is great. Thank you for having me again.

[00:48:37] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I hope that you enjoyed that. Very nice chatting today with Daniel, all about his fabulous new Autoblue plugin. Combining the wonder of Bluesky with the wonder of WordPress. Very nice indeed.

If you've got any comments, head to wpbuilds.com. Use the comment form there. You're gonna be looking for episode number 408 to comment on what you heard today.

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Okay. That really is all I've got time for. Just for me to say, join us on Monday for the This Week in WordPress Show. I'm always joined live by some fabulous guests. It's 2:00 PM UK time. As with many things that we do. You can find it at wp builds.com/live. Hopefully, we'll see you there with some commentary.

If we don't, we'll be back next Thursday for our podcast. But here comes some dreadful, cheesy music. I hope that you can bear it and all that I have to say now is stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.