Design Update: Bluesky embeds now work properly on GV! (and we are no longer burdened by AMP)

Hi all, Jer the GV Tech Lead here with a quick update. Like it says in the title, the GV sites now have full support for Bluesky post embeds, like this one:

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globalvoices.org

[image or embed]

— Global Voices (@globalvoices.org) March 1, 2025 at 1:17 PM

This grey box isn't really a translation, but I used the .translation format just because I can!

Until now they sort of worked, but also caused problems. One issue was that translators had a very hard time managing them during translation. Another was that they didn't work at all in the AMP version of our site.

Translating Bluesky embeds works properly

In terms of translation, it should all be fixed! I made sure that Bluesky embeds work well with .translation blockquotes, and no longer screw up the formatting. Like I said above, they should work exactly like X/Twitter embeds do, which is hopefully comfortable and familiar to experienced GV translators.

GV is now free from AMP

The good news about AMP version of our site is I REMOVED IT COMPLETELY. Thank the heavens, because it was a pain in the butt to manage, and often held us back from using new embeds that worked fine on the regular site. AMP is basically an alternate version of the site that is “faster” and served by Google to people searching on mobile. We started using it many years ago and the value it provided has been nebulous at best.

Previously, requiring AMP support delayed us being able to use TikTok embeds for a long time, and now it was delaying Bluesky. Well, no more! I took the time to completely migrate us off of the platform, so now we have only one version of the GV sites, and it's the one you use every day (though don't forget to check your posts on mobile as well as desktop).

Updated guides

I added a Bluesky embeds section to the WordPress Posting Guide, but mostly it just tells you to use the same instructions as for X/Twitter, so if you want you can jump straight to the Twitter Embed Guidelines if you want to make sure you're doing it properly.

Add your Bluesky account to your GV profile!

screenshot of the user social media settings in the wordpress admin. You can see fields for mastodon, instagram, bluesky, linkedin, and X.com

Log into your WordPress account and make sure all your social media links are up-to-date!

Oh yeah, did you know you can add a Bluesky URL to your Global Voices contributor profile, just like X and Facebook? To do so, just log in to the WordPress site and edit your profile to find the field.

As always, please get in touch here, over email, or on the Global Voices Slack if you notice any bugs with this new feature!

Thanks for reading 🙏🏻

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