For most of April, I’ve had posts going live on this blog, but I haven’t had the desire to go through the long process of posting them on my socials. WordPress used to do this automatically for Twitter, and it has a social plugin that works for many other social media sites, but for some reason the plugin kept not working for me — I think because I have an Instagram Creator account, and not an Instagram for Business account.

Out of sheer frustration, I asked AI (I have a paid account on Claude) how this could be done, and it gave me two options. I spent about half an hour configuring one, only to find that it wasn’t going to work. So I went with the other one instead.

What I discovered is that, in order to make it work, I have to set a Featured Image and write an Excerpt for each blog post. Not terribly difficult to do; just set the Featured Image to be the same as the image I put in the post, and write a quick Excerpt or let WordPress’s AI integration do it for me. But then I realized two things: the Featured Image takes over the image in my sidebar, and the Excerpt shows up as a TLDR at the top of the page.

I own my own domain, and I pay for WordPress hosting; I could simply change my site theme to a different one, one that doesn’t make these changes. But I like my site theme; I’ve had it since I started this site, migrating it over from my old author Tumblr. And I could probably find a developer on Fiverr or something who could make the specific changes I want to override the functions of the Featured Image and the Excerpt. But for right now I’m just seeing how it goes.

So if the blog posts look different to you, that’s why.