With the fallout from Twitter recently a lot of people are moving to other social media channels and one of the popular destinations is Mastodon. For those that don;t know Mastodon is a group of servers that can all talk to each other, so you can have an account on one Mastodon server, but still follow and interact with people on other similar servers.
This is similar to how much of the internet worked when it first came into being and before big tech companies decided to try and dominate various corners for their own benefit. What makes this good for people using the service is simple, no one “owns” Mastodon, and no one person or group controls it.
One of the nice features of Mastodon is that you can verify any site you control to show that it belongs to you. This is done by embedding a small piece of code into your website. It’s a fairly easy process, but less obvious how to do it when you run a site based around Elementor, like mine. But I figured it out and am happy to share with everyone.
The code snippet as generate for me on Mastodon looks like this:
I tried adding this several places, but none of them worked. I could have hit the code directly, but that’s not really the way you’re supposed to do things in Elementor. Also, this produces a link, complete with text, which I don;t want floating randomly around my nicely formatted( 🙂 ) site layout.
The solution as it turns out is quite simple and elegant. Instead of using an <a href> tag, switch to a <link> tag and drop the closing </a>, like this:
To add this code to the site, go into Elementor’s Custom Code section, and click on Add New. Give it a name, then add your verification code in and save it. Here’s mine:
As you can see from the screen capture, I set this code to appear in my Header file. Back in Mastodon. Go to Edit Profile and in the section to add links, add in your Website and address, and that’s it!
Note, that if you already put your website there, you will have to remove the link, save the options than add it back. Also, it may take a while for the Mastodon servers to update and detect the code change, so be patient. And obviously, use your own Mastodon verification not mine – you really don’t want anyone thinking you’re me! 🙂
Hope that helps!
