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.