One of my goals with Autoblue is to be very open and transparent during the process of developing this plugin, and to take you along on the journey. Part of that is sharing feature updates whenever I add something new to Autoblue, which is why I’m writing this post!
Logs aren’t exactly an exciting feature—in fact, I hope you’ll never even need to take a look at them. However, they might be invaluable when you do need them, and as a developer I’m quite excited about this.
Imagine this scenario: you publish a new post, expect it to get shared to Bluesky automatically and… nothing happens. You refresh a few times, but your post doesn’t appear, so instead you end up cursing me under your breath and sharing your post manually.
While I’m working super hard to ensure this never happens, there’s always something that can go wrong. Maybe the Bluesky API is simply down. With Autoblue’s logs, you’ll be able to trace back all the steps that happened when the post got published, and see where things went wrong.
Why logs?
That’s a fair question—logs don’t really sound exciting, especially when thinking about some other features I have planned for Autoblue, such as scheduled shares and media uploads. However, with Autoblue being a brand new plugin still in development, bugs are bound to appear, especially as I add more features.
By adding logs now, I can ensure that when things go wrong it’ll be clear what happened and where the error occurred. This will make it much easier to fix issues quickly, and will hopefully make the experience of using Autoblue much nicer.
If you run into any issues with the new log functionality, please ping me on Bluesky!
Comments
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I’ve been playing with autoblue on my site and it’s very fun and very promising at even this early stage! Thanks! Some ideas from me – auto share can be restricted by taxonomy having the option to include the original Bluesky post in the comments chain when you link a post after the fact
Appreciate it, sorry for the slow reply. Can you elaborate a bit? Do you mean only sharing automatically for some taxonomies? For the second one, do you mean setting a URL for the comments if you didn’t share using Autoblue? That’s possible in the current version.
Suggestion 2: After setting the url for the comments I’d like an option to pull in the original Bluesky post, not just the comments to the post, as part of the comments chain on my blog. Sometimes people are specifically replying to the text of the Bluesky post and you lose context for the comments
Yes it’d be handy to be able to include/exclude specific taxonomies for auto sharing. For example I’d set it up to always share a major ‘project’ post but not every post of ‘sketches’ to my site.
Great feature. As you say…. Hope you never need them, but when you do, you’ll be glad 👍 Are you live on the repo yet?
Thanks Neil! Not live yet but hopefully soon 🤞🏼 In the meantime I’m still shipping features, available from the website, so you won’t miss anything (other than automatic updates).
Nice! Can you tell Autoblue to retry if the log shows post to Bluesky failed?
Not yet, but I will add a feature to manually (re)share soon. For now, if the log shows a fail I’m very interested in hearing what it says 😁