It was in about July of 2024 that I first tried to set it up so that my WordPress blog posts would get shared to Bluesky. A first step was to do a search for “Bluesky” in “add plugins”. This yielded 26 hits. After a lot of clicking around it seemed that most of the hits were plugins that merely mentioned Bluesky but did not actually do anything with Bluesky. Further clicking indicated that some of the hits are apparently “share” buttons, meaning that someone reading one of my blog articles could perhaps click a button and somehow share an article to Bluesky. As best I could discern, only four of the hits are plugins that try to do what I want, which is to auto-post each blog posting onto Bluesky. The four plugins are:
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- Simple Auto-Poster for Bluesky, by Emma Blackwell
- Share on Bluesky, by Matthias Pfefferle
- Neznam Atproto Share, by Marko Banušić
- Auto Post, Auto Publish and Schedule to Twitter, LinkedIn and Social Media – WP to Buffer, by WP Zinc
The fourth plugin (“WP to Buffer”) seems to require that I have “a Buffer account”, whatever that is. I did not feel like investing the time and energy to try to figure out what a Buffer account is, and what the drawbacks are of creating a Buffer account, so I eliminated that plugin from further consideration.
I clicked around on the first plugin (“Simple Auto-Poster”) and encountered this bold-font large-print warning:
PLEASE NOTE: At the moment the plugin only works if the posts are published with featured images (new versions and features coming soon)
This struck me as unclear. I figured it might mean any of three things:
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- Maybe if your post fails to contain an image that happens to be a “featured image”, then the post will not get shared to Bluesky.
- Maybe all of your posts will get shared to Bluesky, but if the post contains an image, the image will not get shared except in the special case where the image happens to be a “featured” image.
- Maybe your posts that contain no images will get shared to Bluesky, and your posts that contain images will get shared to Bluesky only in the special case where the image happens to be a “featured” image.
I will also confess that I do not know what a “featured image” is and how to know the difference between an ordinary (non-featured?) image and a “featured” image. But it seems very clear from the bold-font warning that if I were to choose to try to use Simple Auto-Poster, I would need to learn what it means for an image to be “featured” or to fail to be “featured”. Maybe I have been using featured images all along without even knowing that I am doing so!
Given this striking ambiguity in this bold-font large-print warning for Simple Auto-Poster, I was inclined not to take the time or the energy to experiment with this plugin.
(News flash! I clicked around a bit in my blog and I see that there is a place where I could set a “featured image” in a post or in a page. I have never knowingly done this.)
The second plugin (“Share on Bluesky”) had the drawback that it was “Untested with my version of WordPress” and was said to have a mere 200 active installations.
The third plugin (“Neznam Atproto Share”) had the drawback that it was “Untested with my version of WordPress” and was said to have a mere 50 active installations.
I did eventually try the first three plugins, and could not get any of them to work. Eventually I redoubled my efforts, and eventually got Share on Bluesky to work. This article describes how I eventually got the Share on Bluesky plugin to work.