Since the usage of Mastodon exploded last November a number of online publishing tools such as Tumbler and Medium have started supporting the ActivityPub protocol that underpins Mastodon.
What I didn’t realise however is that there’s a WordPress plugin called ActivityPub that enables folk to publish their blog posts using the protocol. It means that people can subscribe to your blog in Mastodon in the same way as they might follow any other person.
The plugin turns the author profile of the blog into a Mastodon compatible user that you can follow. In my case that’s https://richardbloomfield.blog/author/richard/
I’ve installed it myself to try it out, and people can now follow me @richard@richardbloomfield.blog to get new blog posts directly in their Mastodon feed.
There are also other plugins that can automatically publish the posts (or toots) of people that I follow on my blog, but I haven’t tried that our yet.
I’ve been having a few problems making this ActivityPub stuff work correctly. Apparently there’s a caching conflict because I use Cloudflare. I don’t fully understand it all – but you can read more here: https://jasontucker.blog/14308/whats-with-activitypub-wordpress-cloudflare-not-working
As a temporary measure I’ve disabled the Cloudflare cache, and it seems to have resolved the issue – but it’s not really something I want to do long term.