I love taking photos and I’ve always wanted a place to post my photos online, but I’ve always struggled to find an appropriate place to put them. Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram are of course the obvious choices, but that never really felt like a great way to archive photos I was proud enough to post. Plus once they pass through a timeline they might as well be gone forever. I always thought my blog would be the best place to post, but the mental overhead of “drafting a blog post” just to post a photo always seemed to prevent me from using it that way.
And thats what makes Micro.blog so appealing to me. Micro.blog is a service created by Manton Reece that lets you host your posts on your own blog (either self-hosted or hosted by Micro.blog) that then feeds into the Micro.blog timeline via RSS. But the best part is that Micro.blog encourages short, title-less posts. This feature alone seems to have gotten me past the mental barrier of posting images and other short posts to my blog. Plus my posts can feed into my Micro.blog timeline to be shared with others on the service.
Micro.blog will pretty much work with WordPress out of the box with a couple of small configurations, but I spent some time configuring my WordPress blog to handle the short posts in a specific way so I thought I’d share that here.
I prefer to keep the short, title-less posts out of the main blog and in a feed of their own (using the Status post format in WordPress). The steps below will explain how to configure Micro.blog with WordPress so everything displays correctly and feeds nicely into the Micro.blog timeline.
Micro.blog Configuration
Registering for Micro.blog
Before you get started go ahead and register for an account on Micro.blog. It’s free to sign-up as long as you’re self-hosting your blog and not using the Micro.blog hosted service (which is also a great option if you don’t like tinkering with WordPress or other blogging platforms).
- Register for an account on Micro.blog
- Provide an Email, Username, Full name, and Website
- Select
I already have my own microblog(this tells Micro.blog to read the RSS feed from your self-hosted WordPress blog instead of using a blog hosted by Micro.blog) - Provide the Feed URL of your WordPress blog (
http://www.yourblog.com/feed/) - Click
Registerto create your Micro.blog account
Additional Micro.blog Configuration
You need to add an additional feed to your Micro.blog account since you will be excluding the status post format from the main WordPress blog and including it in a separate feed (but I still like to have my regular blog posts appear in the Micro.blog timeline as well).
- Edit any additional account information (such as About me)
- Click
Updateto save - Add the additional Feed URL for the status post format of your WordPress blog (
http://www.yourblog.com/type/status/feed/) - Click
Add Feedto save
WordPress Configuration
There are a few WordPress tweaks you can optionally make that will allow Micro.blog to verify your website URL and make sure posts appear in the Micro.blog timeline immediately after they are posted.
Verify Website
Verifying your website with Micro.blog enables some additional features. You can verify your website by placing a link to your Micro.blog profile in the website header or anywhere else on your homepage. I choose to add the link to my website header.
- Install the Insert Headers and Footers Plugin (or use any other WordPress plugin that allows editing your website header)
- Go to
Settings → Insert Headers and Footers - Add a link to your Micro.blog profile (
<link href="https://micro.blog/your-username" rel="me" />) - Click
Save
Real-Time Posting
By “pinging” Micro.blog when a new post is published, you can ensure Micro.blog refreshes your feed right away and immediately adds the new post to the Micro.blog timeline.
- Login to your WordPress dashboard (
http://www.yourblog.com/wp-admin/) - Go to
Settings → Writing - In Update Services add:
https://micro.blog/ping - Click
Save Changes
Theme/Plugin Modifications
Because you’re separating the short, title-less posts into the status post format there are some modifications you can make in either your theme’s functions.php file or a site-specific plugin to ensure those posts are handled properly. Also, although I really enjoy creating the title-less posts, I prefer they still have a nice title by date in the WordPress dashboard. These modifications will enable WordPress to automatically create a title and permalink for those posts that displays in the dashboard but is never displayed on the blog or in its feed (big thanks to @colinwalker for helping me out with some of these). There a few other modifications that I think are nice to have when posting to Micro.blog as well.
Add Theme Support for Status Post Format
If your theme doesn’t already support WordPress post formats you’ll need to enable the status post format. This will allow you to assign the status format to your short, title-less posts and display those posts differently in your blog and feed.
Great thorough post! Thank you! 😀
This is great!!! Saved me hours or even days.
In order to use your iOS shortcuts (which are also GREAT!) I had to tweak the post formats line above to include ‘link’ as a format type. Also, when I copied and pasted your add_theme_support line into my functions.php it didn’t add the formats but when I manually typed it, it worked. It seems that the single tick ‘ quotes in your code weren’t pasting correctly.
//* Add support for status post formats
add_theme_support( ‘post-formats’, array( ‘status’, ‘link’ ) );
Hey! Thanks for this guide. As a newb to PHP it has saved me a tonne of time.
For no-title posts, I was wanting to actually display a “default” title on my blog. With your help I can get the date as title, but I’d love to add custom text before the date: “Status on 26-08-2020”. If it’s not too much trouble, could you please tell me how to add custom text before the auto-date?
$title = date( 'd-m-Y' );
I’ve been trying all sorts of options like:
$title = ‘Status on ‘ date( ‘d-m-Y’ );
But I’m really just shooting in the dark 🙁
Thanks for any help.
I understand if you’re too busy to help. Thanks for the helpful page so far!
Cheers from Australia
Update! I think I’ve figured it out:
$title = ‘Status: ‘.date( ‘jS F Y’ );
Thanks
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