Italian, progressive, non-religious; blind since birth, accessibility consultant, WordPress blogger and Fediverse ambassador, HIV awareness advocate. Creator of @plusbrothers fiction/satire project. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🇪🇺🦮🦯 #a11y #blind #WordPress #accessibility #hiv #fedi22 #fediverse #advocacy #activitypub #StopStigma #UEqualsU

BTN-1YI5IZ

  • 4 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
Cake day: November 1st, 2025



  • @Quokka Wait a moment. Is it the same tesseract that develops the OCR? Because I sometimes use that OCR for NVDA screen reader (non visual desktop access). If so, I’ll take it off immediately! This kind of hardcoded deny list, is an abuse. Worse than the one I noticed 25 years ago on MSN messenger where you couldn’t label yourself as “John Doe - webmaster of [project]” but then if you named yourself “I’m the drill for young asses” (said it less rude than it was), Msn messenger let you place that display name upfront.
    Let me say that if you develop a software where you deliberately block pro-trans, pro-sustainability or topic you dev potentially dislike, your software shouldn’t be distributed to the public.








WordPress and ActivityPub: my first fail

@selfhosted

I’ve already posted about my success and fail in the past, but I have something else to talk about: ActivityPub fails in my self hosted WordPress (hostinger vps).

Setup: YunoHost, WordPress multisite. For a multisite network, YunoHost requires WordPress to reside in a folder. Such as “domain .ext /folder” and not “site1 . domain .ext” or “site2 .domain .ext”

Started setup, the site apparently works. But, before involving a co-worker to help me with theme, I wanted to try installing ActivityPub plugin first.

Immediately WordPress health system, warned that endpoint webfinger wasn’t accessible.

Watching the logs, it was YunoHost ssowat and I tried to comment it on domain’s nginx file - /etc/nginx/config.d/domain.ext.conf

Result, from 302 error, it returned 500. “error establishing database connection”.

The .well-known stays on /var/www/.well-known, while WordPress lives on /var/www/wordpress__3

I set all YunoHost’s permissions to “visitors”

I really don’t know where to go, at the moment.

#ActivityPub #AskFedi #FediHelp #selfhost #selfhosting #WordPress #YunoHost





WordPress multisite in selfhosting: one fail, one success

@selfhosted

Starting with the fail: selfhosted site doesn’t associate to the official automattic WordPress mobile app; I’ve (temporarily?) commented the “location xmlrpc.php deny all” rule on /etc/nginx/conf.d/plusbrothers.net’d/wordpress__3.conf

The app correctly generates the “application password” but then returns “impossible to load WordPress site details” (no idea if it’s the correct English word).

SUCCESS:
Ulysses and Drafts, two iPhone/iPad writing apps, successfully publish my texts on WordPress posts, as a draft; I can use those and write what I want. I’ll try to uncomment xmlrpc deny rule again, then retry.

My goal is to write contents on the app, then finalize it on the site.

OTHER SUCCESS:
site works, both with pure “plusbrothers.net” address and physical WordPress location “plusbrothers.net/wp” - applies to /english as well. Before concretely re-posting old contents and writing new ones, I prefer to have a very solid structure.

I have no idea though, about how vulnerable my website is, hostinger vps YunoHost-driven.

It’s been long, long time I didn’t work till late in the night, at the moment I’m writing, it’s 10 minutes to 3 in the morning!

I promised to my best friend (and content writer) that on July 3rd, the walls of our sentient HIV’s house, should have been ready.
And I kept the promise. 3rd July, 3 in the morning, the house stands up. Still dirty, still stinks of building, no possibility to live in it, but at least we won’t fall dead with collapsing ceiling.

Blind selfhoster journey continues.

#blind #experience #selfhost #selfhosting #website #WordPress #YunoHost


  • @bytepursuits @selfhosted I’ve tried one mini-pc about 10 years ago; what a disappointment! It was a small jewel, touching it. It ran Win10, 64GB hard disk. For a couple years it has been my emergency portable aid - I installed NVDA (non visual desktop access) screen reader in it, as JAWS for Windows, the commercial one, is very heavy. So, after a few updates from Win10, this poor machine literally became so, so slow. And, hot. It seemed to have a little oven in my hands.
    Now, I don’t find anything interesting; those machine, low-priced, sold in extra-EU e-commerces, don’t seem trustworthy. The second one I bought was bigger, about the size of an iPad mini. But it arrived with broken LCD screen. As a blind user, I was relying just on audio. But in the end, gearbest said “you have broken it” - money thrown in the toilet.



  • @selfhosted @_elena

    DONE!!! FINALLY! Multi-site works, and fun can begin!

    Our presentation page is up, and I’m impressed as the site seems super-fast. I won’t try activitypub at the moment, maybe next week.
    Content for now, no visuals, it’s still the default WordPress theme; I’ll however continue using Gutenberg block editor for site design, sighted lady will help me with styles, sizes, colors, flags, logo. For now I have what I need: my best friend in POSITIVE (pun very intended) mood ☣️ and my intermediate web dev technical skills, let me build nav bar and HIV glossary before anything else, testing new multi-language echosystem.

    Before starting involving the sighted designer I want the interface to work properly.

    ENGLISH https://plusbrothers.net/english/about/

    ITALIANO: https://plusbrothers.net/cosa-facciamo

    Detail: I had to create a solo Nginx conf file to instruct it to accept main URL, placed on /etc/nginx/conf.d/plusbrothers.net.d/; I can’t deny or hide that for this, AI helped. And precisely, the Hostinger embedded chatbot, trained with main provider base configurations.

    Unfortunately YunoHost has a limitation and wants WordPress to be installed into a subdirectory such as domain dot tld slash wp.

    And leaving it as it is, with its /wp/ at the end of each content, would have generated 404 errors to folks searching for old posts. I wanted to have at least the presentation page published, within July 3rd - the day where New York Times in 1981 talked of HIV for the first time, identifying it as an untreatable disease affecting 41 homosexual men.

    And the weird destiny is that my best friend, and content writer for this project, was born July 3rd 1975. 6 years later AIDS come out in the USA. He’s gay, and turned poz (HIV+) in 2013 due to a cheating partner.

    #selfhosting #yunohost #wordpress



  • @mauvehed @selfhosted @_elena I will update this thread accordingly.
    I’m going to prepare the multisite network with WordPress and YunoHost first, it has some limitations and I had to create some tricks to make it work - I’ll talk about it in deep. Then, will place the WP theme and start working on the user experience, the blocks part of design at least; then at last a sighted designer will help me with colors, styles, size, the visual part I can’t control.
    Multisite network, to make it multilingual (Italian and English) using blocks only, as all multilingual plugins I’ve tried so far, have severe accessibility issues!