Service Update Update – Blogs and Beyond…

Since everyone can see (I hope!) the new home page feature “Latest Articles from the Author Platform” I thought I should update you about… well, what’s going on!

I don’t want to explain the why’s and wherefore’s of the Author Platform quite yet, we’ll do that when were closer to launching. Suffice to say, it will be a gargantuan leap forwards.

As you can see, there’s now a feature on the Colony’s home page featuring the most recent article to appear on the platform. Feel free to click through and read – and preferably, leave a comment or two as well. We’re still at beta stage, but it’s working pretty well.

More soon

Hi, Peter...

Not sure if related, but all the blog comment avatars are set to the Gravatar logo. WordPress sucks at custom avatar generation, so your options to change it are quite Gravatar-centric. I think the same guy runs WP and Gravatar, so yeah.

Anyhoo...you can choose autogenerated options in WP (such as retro avatars). I think those can be set to load externally only the first time so you're not bottlenecked by someone-else's server.

Of course there are plugins that allow custom avatar outside of Gravatar - or you can code it. But you prolly know all this. I've only been using WordPress since April.

Thx Bloo, nice to hear from you, hope all’s OK w you.

Tbh, I have no idea about avatar choice, these are the options, never heard of most of them… what do you suggest?

AgentPete said:

Thx Bloo, nice to hear from you, hope all’s OK w you.

Tbh, I have no idea about avatar choice, these are the options, never heard of most of them… what do you suggest?
View attachment 20803

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Hi, Peter...

Well I use the "Retro" one. But your site is a completely different animal than mine. I'm still very new to this, so take my advice with a martini-ring of salt.

BTW...WP defaulting to the Gravatar logo is not cool. A fine example of enshittification there. Also not cool...forcing site admins to use Gravatar for their own custom avatar. Ugh. There are actually a fix for that...
Change Profile Picture in Wordpress without Gravatar in 2025

And something more in-depth that allows filters and rules...
How to Set a Media Image for User Avatar in WordPress

I'm gonna use the top one to give me some measure of control. I think it's silly to query another server for something that really should be stored locally. You can prolly make the bottom work with colony avatars, although linking each one individually would be madness. I think you've got enough code to automate that with a script. If there are common user IDs between blog and colony, that would be considerably easier. You for sure know more about this stuff than I do.

About me...well I'm okay-ish. Work is stressful (our entire Italian team got the axe). We apps engineers got all the orphaned European customers. Tomorrow our US group reports to the new Swiss boss. Each of us needs to tell him what projects we are working on. It's going to be a weekly meeting. I got a feeling that anyone who isn't busy enough will also get the axe. I'm worried coz a couple of my big projects were sold off with the factory in Italy. My biggest customer has been hit hard by open hostility toward anything "green". So I'm under the gun.

Thank you for asking

Bloo said:

Hi, Peter...

Well I use the "Retro" one. But your site is a completely different animal than mine. I'm still very new to this, so take my advice with a martini-ring of salt.

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Retro it is! Let's see how that works out. But isn’t that a margarita?

Bloo said:

I'm gonna use the top one to give me some measure of control. I think it's silly to query another server for something that really should be stored locally. You can prolly make the bottom work with colony avatars, although linking each one individually would be madness. I think you've got enough code to automate that with a script. If there are common user IDs between blog and colony, that would be considerably easier. You for sure know more about this stuff than I do.

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Actually, we’ve recently separated the two sites somewhat, dot com will still handle full memberships and payment processing, but free members are now able to sign up directly into the Colony.

There are long and complex reasons for doing this, but the interface between the two was kind of insane, requiring Google sheets and Zapier for them just to talk to each other. Plus lots of custom code, too. I’m resisting the urge to start ranting…

Bloo said:

About me...well I'm okay-ish. Work is stressful (our entire Italian team got the axe). We apps engineers got all the orphaned European customers. Tomorrow our US group reports to the new Swiss boss. Each of us needs to tell him what projects we are working on.

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Sounds Muskian. Uh-oh.

Bloo said:

It's going to be a weekly meeting. I got a feeling that anyone who isn't busy enough will also get the axe. I'm worried coz a couple of my big projects were sold off with the factory in Italy. My biggest customer has been hit hard by open hostility toward anything "green". So I'm under the gun.

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Hopefully they’re not holding AI over your head, too. Quality of software is going to plummet. I’m still somewhat suspicious that this may have been a factor in the Air India crash, altho they say it was the seat moving. Two-engine shutdown has happened before on a 787 when a subsystem thought the engines were racing (they were actually landing!). Scary stuff.
Consider getting a job with client?