Some small Mastodon updates
Just a couple of small behinds the scenes updates this week, both related to my Mastodon profile.
Verifying this site and linking it to my Mastodon profile was first up. This is really simple, just a single line of code added to the head element of my homepage, like so;
<a rel="me" href="https://mastodon.social/@thisstevejames">Mastodon></a>
That's it, and now my site can be verified and linked to my profile.
Next up was author attribution. Now don't get me wrong, I certainly don't class myself as a 'Author' author. But if I post something that I've written here on to Mastodon - or god-forbid, someone else reads something I've written and decides to share it - then it makes sense to be identified as the person who wrote it.
This was new to Mastodon v4.3, and I only came across it after someone shared a post from Robb Knight linking to his blog post on how to set-up Author Attribution.
That too is really simple, and I was already logged in to update my website verification, it was a simple scroll down to find the section to add this website to the Author Attribution section. Once I'd added the address of this website it was just a matter of adding another line of code to my header.
<meta name="fediverse:creator" content="@thisstevejames@mastodon.social"></a>
Now (or at least when -or if - a moderator approves it) only stuff that I write on this site can, or will, be attributed to me. Neat.
Now I've just got too keep writing…
* Note - The original version of this post didn't contain the code snippets referred to above, as I could't get them to display despite being inside a 'code' element. So, TIL how to escape the angle brackets using HTML character entities. Which meant that I also learnt that HTML character entities are a thing!