Hi there,
I’m Alex Kirk, a web application programmer and experienced lead of remote teams, based in Vienna, Austria. I speak German and English.
I currently work with Automattic. In my personal time, I created and maintain the Friends and the Enable Mastodon Apps plugins for WordPress.

Follow me via RSS or reach me via ActivityPub (Mastodon) at @alex@kirk.at (powered by Friends & EMA), or bridged on Bluesky at @alex.kirk.at

Recent Post Highlights

I write about various aspects of web applications and WordPress. For example:

Last 5 Posts & more

  • Can’t Follow You!

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    So, I created this little website https://cantfollowyou.kirk.at/ as something that you can send to people who don’t realize that they are on a closed network and what it means to others. A bit like Let me Google that for you but for the Fediverse. Here is the backstory, and some details around it: I attended…

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  • WordPress as a Refuge from Algorithms

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    In a previous post, I have written about how you can use WordPress as your own Mastodon instance with the three plugins ActivityPub, Friends, and Enable Mastodon Apps. The Friends plugin also provides an RSS/Atom feed parser (and can be extended with more of them) so you that you can automatically receive content from many…

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  • Reblog of jeckman: WordPress and the Fediverse

    Posted in

    Reblog via jeckman. Great slides! Thanks for mentioning the Friends plugin! [John Eckman] gave a talk at the Boston WordPress Meetup last night about WordPress and the Fediverse Slideshare link (You Got Your WordPress in My Fediverse): Went well I think – did not have a ton of time to put it together, and you…

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  • WordPress as a Self-Hosting Platform

    Posted in

    Leaving the current drama around WordPress.org aside for now, I believe that there is a use case for WordPress that is heavily underutilized: Using WordPress as a platform for self-hosting. When people think WordPress, they think publishing platform. And, of course, that’s its nature. It was built for expressing yourself publicly on the internet. But…

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  • Help Make (the) Friends (Plugin) Pretty

    Posted in

    While I keep maintaining my Friends plugin for WordPress, there is an area where it could do better because I am not great at it: the visual appeal. From pretty early on, I designed the plugin in a way that it Over time, some of this has changed or improved. For example, you can now…

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Find all of my posts in the archive.