/blog

It's Monday so I'm in the office (every Monday and every other Thursday.) It's mostly hot-desking within specific "neighbourhoods" related to the part of the business you are in.

I get in early so I can leave early and, being a creature of habit, always sit in the same place. This morning, however, someone was already sat at my desk! ¹

It threw me such that I had a brief moment of panic – "what am I going to do?" I don't know why it affected me so much but I had to stop and think about something as simple as where to sit.

Okay, so, against my better judgement, curiosity got the better of me and I signed up for Bluesky last night.

The onboarding process through the Android app was pretty smooth and I got things set up quickly. I decided to add this site's address as a custom domain and initially feared there might be a degree of API shenanigans involved – nope, a simple matter of adding a text file to your .well-known directory or adding a TXT entry to your DNS. I opted for the former being on my phone. ¹

The weird thing about joining a social network is that you feel like your late to a party and the other guests are already deep in conversation.

Looking through various feeds and the following lists of others, I see a lot of the same names from the early days of Twitter. There's no sense in recreating something that didn't work then as it equally won't work now.

So, if you're on Bluesky let me know or, better still, follow me @colinwalker.blog and we'll see what happens.

There are some PHP libraries for interacting with the Bluesky API. I was toying with the idea of adding one to the site and using it to cross post – saves me having to work it out for myself 😊

Using Clark Rasmussen's BlueskyAPI library I was able to make a post on a dummy page. The next step is to integrate it into the blog and attach a 'link card' for the post.

Because Bluesky has a 300 character limit I also have to truncate the post contents.

This is a test using some additional information from Neil Thompson's php2Bluesky repo.

Success It took a few attempts to get it right but new posts will now automatically cross post to Bluesky.