announcements

ACTION REQUESTED of all current and former users of this network: we’re conducting a (long overdue) review of which sites and users are still active, and which can be archived. This will help reduce maintenance and server requirements, as well as reduce security risk. Emails will be sent out soon to site owners and users, but if you see this notice before then, you can help us out by letting us know right away: do you still use and maintain the site we host for you here on Indivisible.blue? Or has it fallen out of use and is no longer needed? No hard feelings – just fill out this form to let us know!

I happened to stumble recently on ForwardEmail.net, a slick, free service that allows you to have email addresses for your domain, but without having to pay for or manage full email service. Instead, messages are simply forwarded to whatever existing email address you already have (GMail, Hotmail, Fastmail (save 10% with that affiliate link, btw), whatever). Suppose, for example, you run the site IndivisibleMaralago.com. With this service you could have a working email address like info@indivisiblemaralago.com forwarded to an existing email like trumpisbad12345@gmail.com. You can have as many of these aliases as you want, for free. Why not get real email service for your group? You can sure do that, and it might make sense. But I’ve been involved with continue reading

For your plugin pleasure, we’ve recently installed a few new tools based on site admin requests: The Events Calendar – “Create an events calendar and manage it with ease. Packed with loads of useful features, The Events Calendar by Modern Tribe is ready to go right out of the box. It’s extensible, easy to use, and completely customizable.” Weglot Translate – “With Weglot Translate, you can translate your site into a multilingual website with multiple languages in minutes without doing any code. Weglot Translate is totally SEO compatible.” Google Photos Gallery with Shortcodes – “Use the plugin to display your Google Photo (Picasa) Albums on your WordPress blog. Using the shortcodes it is simple to embed a single album or continue reading

The release of WordPress 5.0 included an enhanced editor interface called “Gutenberg”. I updated the WordPress software to that version as soon as it was available, as always, but I worried that the sudden and fairly drastic change might catch some of Indivisible.blue’s many users off guard. The solution, as usual for WordPress: a plugin! I installed the Classic Editor plugin, which kept the same old tried & true editor interface in place. If and when site administrators are ready to switch over to the Gutenberg (aka “block”) editor, you can do that via selections under Settings -> Writing in your dashboard. As always, let me know if you have any questions!

This has been in place for a while, but I neglected to announce it widely: two-factor authentication is now built in and available to every user of every Indivisible.blue site. Setting this up adds an additional level of security to keep someone from logging in as you. (Here’s a good article explaining two-factor authentication, if you’re not familiar with it.) To enable this for yourself or Indivisible.blue users you administer, start at the “Users” section of your WordPress dashboard. The list there includes a new column that shows whether two-factor is enabled for each user. To change the settings, click “edit” for a user, and then scroll down to the “Two-Factor Options” section. I recommend using “Time Based One-Time Password continue reading

Though I haven’t kept this blog up to date very well lately, this network of Indivisible sites is still going strong, and still growing. In addition to adding new sites, and keeping the software here humming along smoothly, I have some exciting news to share with you. First is a new partnership between Indivisible.blue and Indivisible Austin. Though a lot of folks have assumed that since Indivisible.blue hosts WordPress sites and is based in Austin, that my own local group’s WordPress site was also hosted here. But as one of the earliest organizations in the nation founded on the Indivisible Guide, their site predated this one. I did work with them to make their popular and attractive theme available to continue reading

Yes, this project is still a going concern, and yes, it’s easier to say “I’ll write an update every week” than it is to actually do that. But rest assured, software updates and backups have been running right on schedule, regardless of posting regularity. The news I wanted to share with you is that hosting Indivisible group websites on this network will now be provided free of cost. That has been the case from the start, thanks to an early, generous donation and modest expenses. But I’ve decided to make it official, and permanent: Indivisible.blue is free. From the start of this project, I wanted to make sure it would be sustainable over the long years ahead of fighting the continue reading

Thanks to prodding from a site admin (hi, Shea!), I dug in tonight and got the Akismet comment-spam blocking plugin activated for all sites on Indivisible.blue. Which means that spam comments left on your sites’ posts will now automatically be filtered out. Admins of individual sites don’t have to do anything, no API key to sign up for or enter. (If you want to adjust the couple of options, visit “Jetpack -> Akismet” on your dashboard.)

I’m still getting things together around here, but if you want to keep up with what’s new, you might want to follow my brand-new Twitter account: indivisibleblue.