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

  • npm install playground-step-library

    Posted in ,

    I have updated my Playground Step Library (which I had written about before)–the tool that allows you to use more advanced steps in WordPress Playground–so that it can now also be used programmatically: It is now an npm package: playground-step-library. Behind the scenes this actually dominoed into migrating it to TypeScript and restructuring the code…

    read more

  • Can’t Follow You!

    Posted in ,

    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…

    read more

  • WordPress as a Refuge from Algorithms

    Posted in , , , ,

    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…

    read more

  • 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…

    read more

  • 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…

    read more

Find all of my posts in the archive.