General, Technical

oEmbeds Stopped Working: adapting to the new Instagram/Facebook API

What a mess. Just found out that WordPress no longer supports Facebook Instagram oEmbeds, which essentially breaks the format of single Instagram posts on my other sites.

Unfortunately using a plug-in such as Smash Balloon Social Photo Feeds is causing me some grief due to a reliance on Facebook’s API. Already Facebook, unknown to me, locked my account for suspicious activity. (I have a 30 day old account, to use on Messenger and one group.) Then when I finally resolved that issue, Smash Balloon still insists on setting up a Facebook business page to allow for unlimited tokens. So much for staying off Facebook.

Finally, once I took care of the token I just had to repost some of the Instagram posts that were affected; Smash Balloon took care of the rest.

On a side note can you believe WordPress is on version 5.x? It’s come a long way since I first started using it over a decade ago. Also PHP just released version 8, but I guess WordPress is not ready for it yet…so for now, my sites are/will be running 7.4.

I still have to troubleshoot site health issues with my garden blog. I thought hosting on Linode would improve my site’s performance. I’m not sure sharing a database on AWS with my main site is causing the problem. More on that later.

Oh and another inconvenience is using the WordPress app on my my phone. I have to turn off Google VPN to access my self-hosted WordPress sites. It’s becoming quite a chore to disable it while trying to write a post.

Ye Olde Garden

Soil block adventures

Thanks to Prime Day, I picked up a soil blocker. I’m on my way to seed starting and cultivating plants in soil blocks.

This meant also making my own seed starting mix, something that I’ve been wanting to do ever since pandemic gardening switched into full gear. I came up with my own DIY mix with media I was able to collect locally.

  • 1 part perlite
  • 1 part organic raised garden soil (Miracle Gro)
  • 1 part organic compost
  • 1-2 handfuls of organic plant food (Espoma Garden Tone)

I used a 1 gallon ice cream plastic container to bucket out my portions into a seed tray and began mixing away.

Realizing that mixing this media in a shallow tray would result in a mess and lots of wastage, I made sure to create a 2nd batch in a stainless steel full size steam pan. We were previously experimenting with high sided steam pans to double as litter trays, but decided it was impractical to keep lidless trays with dogs roaming about looking for “kitty treats”.

Those high sides made it easy to contain the soil mix that turns to slush once you add water. Then it’s just a matter of finding the right jig/dance with the soil blocker to pack the slushy mix and eject the molded blocks.

I forgot to measure the amount of water added to the mix. I was mainly trying to go by feel…so some of my extruded blocks ended up a little crumblier than the next batch. So it’s trial and error for now until I come up with a system that I’m satisfied with and produces the desired results: mainly healthy seedlings.

By the 3rd day, radish, lettuce and kohlrabi seedlings popped up. Success!