Following advice from Manton, I’m configuring a new microblog feed on this site. I’d like to own my content, so I want my micro posts to originate here and then mirror over to Twitter.
Per Manton’s recommendations, I’m configuring these micro posts as a Status format, without titles, and in their own category — Micro.
I modified the site’s .htaccess file so that the current RSS feed excludes posts from the Micro category, and to create a Micro feed with only posts from this category. To do this, I changed /var/www/jeffvautin.com/.htaccess from:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
To:
# BEGIN micro
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^rss\.xml$ "/feed?cat=-104"[L,R]
RewriteRule ^micro\.xml$ "/feed?cat=104"[L,R]
RewriteCond %{Query_STRING} ^$
RewriteRule ^feed/?$ "/rss.xml" [L,R]
</IfModule>
# END micro
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
Where 104 is the category ID for the Micro category. I copied most of this from the discussion on the gist Manton provided, with one modification: I added /? (optional trailing slash) to the following line, so that either https://jeffvautin.com/feed or https://jeffvautin.com/feed/ would find the micro-less feed:
RewriteRule ^feed/?$ "/rss.xml" [L,R]
I found good resources regarding the .htaccess file from Digital Ocean:
Next, I created an IFTTT rule to watch for posts in the Micro feed and to put the post content in a tweet.
I still want to setup a simple posting method from my iPhone, likely using Workflow. I also want to clean up the site’s appearance — I Status posts have a bit of extra cruft displayed that I could clean up, and the Recent Posts widget displays title-less posts by their post ID, which is unsightly.