The whole reddit saga is a great reminder to always be mindful of whether and how much whatever company’s interest aligns with your own, whether said company is your employer, a service you use, or a purveyor you buy from.

While working on my patch to support image alt text, I relied heavily on Nova’s integration with PHP’s XDebug to help with my unfamiliarity with PHP and WordPress. It reminded me of how crazy it seems whenever I meet developers who don’t take the time to figure out debugging.

Adding Alternative Text to Images Sent to Mastodon

I added support for alt text in my hack to autopost to Mastodon. MarsEdit doesn’t support saving alt texts into the corresponding WordPress field due to some API limitation, so I had to get them from the img tags directly. The whole effort involves several things I am not super familiar with. In addition to PHP and WordPress, I had to relearn XPath to query the markup for img alt attributes and then modify the raw form data to include them as descriptions. Not fun, but worth it.