Ok, so I installed ActivityPub on my hosted WordPress blog. I can view my Wild Rye blog account (phoutz@wildrye.com) through my Mastodon account. But I can’t view any posts. Also, while Mastodon indicates that I’m following Wild Rye, my blog isn’t showing up in my followers list.
I have no idea what’s wrong and wouldn’t know the first thing to say to a support person or on a forum. There are some problems with Site Health…something about a PHP error. I tried doing an automatic update to the next version of WordPress…but I get some kind of error that it can’t complete. As I investigate the error I see that the automatic update is scheduled to complete in ten hours.
Ah, good times. All of this brings back the early days of getting a website up and running based on whatever scraplets of information you could find on Usenet.
Mind you, I’m not blaming ActivityPub here…it’s the whole thing. Lots of little parts, no comprehensive manual and it’s all so DIY.
UPDATE – PHP Error and Bad Plugins
Running “Site Health” under the Tools menu on WordPress gave me the following error:
A PHP session was created by a session_start() function call. This interferes with REST API and loopback requests. The session should be closed by session_write_close() before making any HTTP requests.
ChatGPT gave me some unhelpful advice about modifying the code (how do you even access the code?). But it also said “If the issue persists, it’s possible that a plugin or theme is causing the problem. Deactivate your plugins and switch to a default WordPress theme (like Twenty Twenty-One) to see if the issue persists. If the problem goes away, reactivate plugins and switch back to your theme one by one until you find the culprit.”
So I turned off my themes and plugins and – voila! The error went away.
UPDATE TWO – Webfinger
Some threads online suggest activating the Webfinger plugin. However, ActivityPub has basic Webfinger functionality built-in. Checking my site on Webfinger shows no errors.
