Autoblue 1.0 is out, officially out of beta and now with support for self-hosted PDS instances! 🎊 Next up: improving the comments block

I ran into an issue where my local WordPress installation using Herd wasn't generating thumbnails for PDF files. This is how I fixed it.

And here's the result—a polished file upload UI that looks like it came straight from WordPress core. Another step closer to releasing the Document Hub extension for Better Loop. 🤞🏼

I always always always want my plugins to feel like they belong in WordPress. It's very important to me that they feel like a native extension of WP itself. If that means designing custom icons in the same style for the Document Hub extension, then that's what I'll do 😅

How hard is it to build a loop with multiple filters working together in Better Loop? Watch me design and build a loop for a recipe page in less than two minutes 😎

Trying something new: live demos for Better Loop, showcasing the plugin through a made-up website. Next step is creating a Playground blueprint so you can click around the admin and play with it! betterloopwp.com/demo-magazine/

Better Loop 1.2 is out! With a new Buttons filter block, more color options and a custom post template block. I'm experimenting with an "interactive" changelog, with live demos so you can try out all new features right from the changelog: betterloopwp.com/changelog/v1...

For those of you using a filtering plugin (FacetWP, Search & Filter etc), what are some must-haves for you personally? What's something currently missing that you would love to have?

I've been working on the documentation for the different pagination options in Better Loop. Really happy with all the live examples! Check out the infinite scroll docs here to get an idea: betterloopwp.com/docs/infinit...

@nathanwrigley.com Thank you for the plug! Much appreciated 🙏🏼 lots of cool stuff to come as well 😁

I've added a pretty steep launch discount to Better Loop (almost 40% off!). It' also the lowest price it'll ever be. I want to reward early customers for their support. As a bonus, early customers get to shape future updates with your feedback and ideas. I want to build Better Loop for you!

You can check it out here (the cards linking to each doc item are built using Better Loop): betterloopwp.com/docs/

Neat lil' feature coming to Better Loop 1.1.0: link to post. This makes the entire card clickable, rather than just the post title. It's also quite fun to get to create a custom icon 🫨

Interactivity API, Block Bindings, an AI team, View Transitions... there's actually so much cool stuff happening for WordPress right now.

this plugin is awesome and you should totally check it out

I've been writing a lot of documentation for Better Loop, and playing around with the ACF and WooCommerce integrations. It's shaping up great. betterloopwp.com/docs/

I've just created and released a demo video for Better Loop and posted it on the homepage. Hopefully it'll do a good job showing people what Better Loop is and what it's capable of!

Pretty happy with how this is shaping up!

You can safely give normal users so much power with the WordPress block editor. @sethrubenstein.info is the lead developer at the Pew Research Center. Check out his demo of how they empower ordinary users to update their site's busy homepage ⬇️

I’ve started writing the docs for Better Loop and it’s surprisingly fun?? Yeah it’s hard but it’s also very rewarding—really cool to see something I made take shape, and it helps me to spot bugs and missing features. First draft will be out in the next few days 🦉

I haven’t yet launched it officially, but Better Loop is now available! I truly think it’ll be a super useful plugin for anyone using the block editor. There’s loads more to come, and I’d love to answer any questions you might have! Also very open to implementing requests whenever possible 🙏🏼

I've been working on Better Loop for the past couple weeks and I'm so excited about it. It's Query block meets instant search, filters, load more/infinite scroll and more query options. It's a plugin I would've liked to use on pretty much all client projects I've done in the past couple years.

Apparently em dashes are now a sign of text written by AI? You will never take my em dashes away from me 😤

I really really need to redo my personal website—I have a bunch of really cool projects from the past ~2 years that I should be showing off and talking about! Right now there's nothing other than me promising I know what I'm doing 😅

Sharing a little tip after reading @bell.bz's post yesterday—try writing a blog post using your voice!

I'm so confused by Autoblue's SEO and would love some advice. When searching for "autoblue", autoblue.co pops up as the first result. However, search for something like "bluesky for wordpress" and Autoblue is nowhere to be found, even though a few articles reviewing Autoblue pop up (!) 😵‍💫

I'm building the Autoblue Premium add-on right now. Price will be $5/month, or $50/year. Initially it'll have support for multiple accounts, as well as priority support, and over time more and more premium features will be added (without the price changing).

I've recently moved all my projects from DeployHQ to GitHub Actions, and wrote a little bit about how I did it!

Feels goooooooooood to be working on Autoblue again.

Just released Autoblue 0.0.5! Some bug fixes and a filter for setting a custom message. Next up: a Changelog page on the website, as well as some proper docs.

Unraid, Adguard Home, Docker, Tailscale and Nginx Proxy Manager are making my homelab tinkering so much fun.

A little late, but a while ago I sat down with @nathanwrigley.com to discuss Autoblue and Bluesky. It was a lot of fun, and I would love to hear what you think.

Really nice to see Autoblue featured here!

Huge thanks to @nathanwrigley.com for having me on his WP Builds podcast! I had a blast chatting with Nathan about Bluesky, WordPress and my plugin Autoblue.

@lesley.pizza If I may ask, what kind of issues did you run into with MailerGlue? I’m toying with a similar approach for a project I’m working on. Is deliverability a big issue even when using an external service like SES?

This resonates with me. I have a few products that I would replace with the exact same thing in a heartbeat, and a few software licenses I will always renew because they’re just so good/useful. It’s a noble goal for any product.

I've written down some of my goals of 2025 that are important to me right now. It'll be fun to revisit this list at the end of the year and see how I did.

If you've used Autoblue and liked it, writing a review would be super helpful for me, and very much appreciated! wordpress.org/plugins/auto... 🙇🏼‍♂️ If you didn't like it or it didn't work for you, please let me know and I'll do whatever I can to help.

Walking through Central Park in the snow is such a magical feeling. It's hard not to feel romantic about New York.

I wanted to learn more about devops, and I'm surprised how much fun I'm having with installing and configuring nginx, setting up automated backups to S3 etc—it feels good getting an understanding of how this all works under the hood.

Doing a little web design... 👀

Autoblue (latest version) worked with the .webp image on the site and with ActivityPub federating at the same time, both problems solved by @danielpost.com 🎉

Do you see anything special at the bottom of the page here? 👀 autoblue.cc/autoblue-now...

I would love to add some testimonials to the Autoblue website (even though it's still early). If you've used Autoblue already and liked it, or even if you're simply excited about it, I would absolutely love it if you could share a testimonial here: senja.io/p/autoblue/r... Thank you!!! 🙏🏼

My oh my, the @raycast.com website is just too good. Might have to borrow some ideas and see if I can turn it into something decent for Autoblue 🤔

Some minor but important quality of life fixes shipped: ampersands now work correctly in post titles when sharing, and newlines no longer get stripped from custom messages. I'll start creating a changelog page to keep these organised as soon as I'm in the repo 😁

Autoblue now has logs! I already teased this feature a bit, and it's now included in the newest alpha version of Autoblue (available for download on the site). I wrote a little bit about my thought process. Let me know what you think!

The logging interface for Autoblue is finished and will be included in tomorrow's update! I'm pretty darn happy with the UX, and I think it really feels like it belongs in WordPress. In general, I want Autoblue to be intuitive and just plain fun to use. This'll be so helpful when debugging issues!

I'm also hoping to find some time this week to go through @robhope.com's "Show Them" course to level up Autoblue's website. I purchased his book with landing page tips a few years ago and found it very helpful, and I bet this course will be even better. 🙏🏼

I'm cautiously optimistic that Autoblue will be available on the WordPress repository this week. I submitted the plugin on November 27th, and the review time has been around 14-16 days, so hopefully soon. Either way, lots of cool stuff coming this week, so stay tuned!