Watching the flow of ActivityPub posts via WordPress

[scripting]

I want to see how people are using the connection between WordPress and ActivityPub.

Right now all I see are the posts I write.

Seeing what people are doing might give us ideas how to improve our respective products.

1999

We had a similar itch in 1999 when we wanted to see what the bloggers were writing. When a blog updated it would ping, we'd verify that they changed and if so, it would appear at the top of the list at weblogs.com.

Its output was a file called changes.xml, it had three bits of info for each update, the name, a url and timestamp.

There was a limit to 100 items in the file.

2025

wordpress.com maintains a changes.json file at a fixed location which we can poll.

there's a limit to the number of items in the file.

each item has:

1. name of blog it came from
2. title of the post if it has one
3. when it was published
4. url of the post via mastodon
5. url of the post via wordpress
6. url of rss feed for the site

that's where to start. let's see what we get to see where we go with this.

What will happen

We will of course share the info with the people who are using it. ;-)

Guess what we'll all start writing about -- how great it is and what doesn't work.

Giving a voice to the bloggers to help drive the direction of the tech.

I bet the users we're attracting now are pretty leading edge people.