How to: Mastodon Profile Verification for WordPress Website

christine on November 11, 2022

Are you part of the twitter migration? Me too! I chose Mastodon as my social app of choice, and ruby.social as my community of choice.

Learning Mastodon takes time, and I am right there with you. There is one thing that I can be assistance with, helping you figure out how to verify your website link in your profile. I am on WordPress, because it is a cool content management system, allows me as a non-frontend dev to have something that looks halfway decent with a minimal amount of work, and well I believe in dogfooding.

Head on over to your Mastodon profile, and click edit profile

Author’s picture with the option to click “Edit profile”

In your Mastodon Profile metadata section, add in your personal website, then Save changes. Notice the Verification section off to the right of the metadata options? Copy your customized verification link.

You can verify yourself as the owner of the links in your profile metadata. For that, the linked website must contain a link back to your Mastodon profile. The link back must have a rel="me" attribute. The text content of the link does not matter. 

Mastodon settings/profile
Mastodon Verification section

Next head to your website and add the link on your site anywhere. For example in a footer/header section where you might have other social links. For my WordPress site, I added a Custom HTML block in my sidebar widget section with my Mastodon profile link.

Screengrab of my default Sidebar section, with the Custom HTML block

To check that everything is correct for verification, check out your page source. As with many things front end, checking on the raw HTML (for us the div tag) is the best way to see what the link actually is using in its metadata. The important part for Mastodon verification is the rel="me" attribute. When I look at my page source, I see that it is there

Page source of christine-seeman.com view in Chrome Developer Tools

That’s it! It might take a bit for your verification to show up on your profile (caching/propagation take time) but you should see that sweet green highlighting eventually to let everyone know that you really do control access to that link.

Write your conference bio

christine on September 28, 2022

So about 4 years, I found myself in need of writing a biography for speaking at a conference. I reached out to dev.to for ideas.

Since then, I have spoken at a couple more conference and have found myself tweaking that bio along the way. Just like talk descriptions, it always feels like there is room for improvement. You change. Your talk changes. Why shouldn’t you make sure that is reflected in your bios?

So here was a sample format that I started with (take from a comment on dev.to)

{Name} is from {City, State} where he/she works as an {Title} at {Company}. He/She has {#} years of experience with {Technology Name} with a focus on {Technology Focus}. In his/her spare time, {Name} enjoys {Personal Interest #1} and {Personal Interest #2}.

Ryan

And that did get me one of my first bios:
Christine is from Omaha, Nebraska where she works as a full stack Ruby on Rails engineer at Flywheel, WordPress hosting for creatives. She has 12 years experience as a Java software engineer with a focus on APIs and micro-services and took the plunge into Ruby just this May. In her spare time she is an avid long form reader, lover of all true-crime podcasts and is attempting to work through the primary Ashtanga yoga series.

Now my bio looks a bit like this:
Christine is a lifetime learner from Omaha, NE (in the middle of the USA), where she likes to read too much and eats food that probably took too long to prepare. Professionally she’s helping solve problems on the Identity team at WP Engine. She loves working with Ruby, showing people that long Git commits are impressive, and helping write secure, easy-to-read software that powers authorization and authentication at her company.

What changed from that time?
Well, the company I was at in 2018 was acquired. I have moved around teams 3-4 times and been to many more conferences.
To me, what you want to get out of a bio is, who is this person, and why should I listen to them? And it wouldn’t be wrong to see a bit of that person’s personality. I love whimsy and positivity and have tons of other interests that have nothing to do with why I do it for my career. My career is not my life. I want my bio to show that.

So let me introduce an updated conference bio template:

{Name} is from {Current Location} who enjoys {Personal Passion 1}, {Personal Passion 2}, and {Personal Passion 3} . {They/She/Him} professionally {verb ex. teach, code, design, architect, build…} {tech stack} at {company} and are passionate about {Technology/Professional focus} and have been involved in the field for {#} years. {the Last sentence ties back to your talk experience, ex. I talk about MFA, so I mention that I am involved with it professionally.}

Christine’s 2022 Technical Conference Speaker BIO Template

What do you think? Does this get you what you want to know about your conference speakers?