Tag: wordpress

Disqus and their WordPress integration are a joke (#E17F1)

There, I said it. I did use stronger wording in the first revision, though.

In no particular order:

Disabling the plugin and re-enabling breaks the comment integration. The three comments made via Disqus are still available on their page, they can still be exported to an XML file that cannot be imported anywhere, but they don’t show up here. That’s a fundamental no-go. It’s broken if it cannot do that. I will not enter a vendor lock-in when my benefits are ads over which I have no control or paying 132 bucks a year.

The Disqus plugin settings menu is utterly pointless if something goes wrong. […]


Disqus comment system (#E17)

I just pulled the plug on the onboard WordPress comment system in favour of a Disqus plugin. While I’m not entirely sure if that is a good idea and will stay that way, the regular comment system is utterly broken in today’s internet. There’s not too many visitors to the site in general and registering for a comment is a hassle, but leaving the comment system open to any bot out there simply doesn’t cut it. Even with the former regulations in place, the spam-to-comment ratio was around 150:1, and the spam detection isn’t 100% accurate as well. […]


ESP32 hardware faders (#P27)

Maybe my google-fu is rusty, or there’s simply no full example of this on the Interwebs…that’s pretty strange.

This is about the cherished ESP32 that will feature an extension/replacement of my #P7 series. This was an ESP8266 board that replaced a dumb lighting control, offering sensor logging to a database. I quickly found out that the limited pin count (and quirks) of the ESP8266 would require me to think about e.g. shift register extensions to make the entire project viable – which now got replaced with the large ESP32 that does have all the flexibility that I need. […]


A pleasant Jetpack support surprise (#E11)

Now something wholesome from grumpy me – around two weeks ago, one of the many WordPress updates caused the subsequent Jetpack update to fail. Jetpack, for those who do not know, is to me mainly a stats extension to the whole WordPress shebang, but they do offer quite a bit more than that, especially in the paid plans (which I do not have). Login security, backups, SEO, you name it. When hosting on wordpress.com, that stuff is included by default, and for self-hosted WordPress installations, it’s basically the first plugin to activate. […]


Let’s Encrypt! (#E7)

Just added a SSL/TLS certificate to the site, which once again is a breeze due to the very helpful commandline tools of my hoster uberspace. Works for me, at the moment, so let’s see how much stuff breaks in WordPress over the next few days and months. What could possibly go wrong :grin:

(Yes, I know HTTP logins aren’t state of the art, but why serve HTTPS to literally a thousand spammer accounts that never ever managed to sign in? Waiting for the first one to actually pass…) […]