Tip #176

Check the status and availability of Vivaldi’s online services on vivaldistatus.com.

Whether we’re doing scheduled maintenance or servers are acting up despite all the love we give them, there’s always a chance that Vivaldi’s online services will be temporarily unavailable. With scheduled maintenance we notify our users ahead of time via email* and notifications on the website, so downtime wouldn’t come as a surprise. With unexpected outages our system administrators do their best to get things back up again as fast as possible.

If you’re having trouble accessing and using Vivaldi services, it’s good to check our status page on https://vivaldistatus.com, to confirm whether the services are operational or there’s something going on.

*Make sure you’re subscribed to Technical Updates on your account’s profile on Vivaldi.net.

Tip #174

Add alternative text to images you post on Vivaldi Social and Community Blogs.

Alternative or alt text is a short description of what is shown on the image. It is shown when the image can’t be displayed and is indexed by search engines. More importantly, alt text is used by screen reader software that helps visually impaired people browse the web. To contribute to making the web accessible for everyone, it’s strongly encouraged to add proper alt text to any images accompanying your posts on Vivaldi Social, Community Blogs on Vivaldi.net and other places on the web.

To add alt text to images you post on Vivaldi Social:

  1. Add an attachment to your post.
  2. Click on Edit in the top right corner of the image preview.
  3. Enter a description.
  4. Click Apply.

To add alt text to images in your blog posts:

  1. Upload or add an image from the Media Library to your blog post.
  2. Select the image.
  3. In block settings on the right side, look for Image Settings.
  4. Enter a description in the Alt text (alternative text) section.

Keep the description brief. If the image has text, it’s good to include it in the description. There’s no need to add alt text, if the image is only decorative and not related to the content.

Media editing window on Vivaldi Social with an example image and description.
Adding a description to an image on Vivaldi Social

Tip #162

Share posts from Vivaldi.com and Vivaldi.net easily on Mastodon.

Vivaldi Social and other Mastodon instances are all about sharing your ideas and cool things you’d like others to know about. Vivaldi’s Team Blog as well as Blogs and Themes by our amazing Community members are definitely worth sharing.

To share content from vivaldi.com and vivaldi.net:

  1. Make sure you’re logged in to your account on Vivaldi Social or another Mastodon instance where you have an account.
  2. Open the blog post or theme you want to share.
  3. Below the blog post/theme click on Mastodon among the Share options.
  4. In the dialog that opens, enter the link of your Mastodon instance.
  5. Review and, if you wish, add something to the post.
  6. Click Publish.
Vivaldi blog post open in Vivaldi Browser with a dialog to enter one's instance's link highlighted.

Tip #155

Filter posts by language on Vivaldi Social.

Vivaldi Community on Vivaldi Social is an international group of people, who post in many different languages. This means that the public timelines (e.g. Local and Federated) can include posts that you don’t understand. You could use Vivaldi Translate to select and translate the texts, but you can also filter them out altogether.

To filter posts by language:

  1. On Vivaldi Social, go to Preferences > Other > Public Timelines.
  2. In the Filter languages section, check the boxes for all languages you want to see posts in.
  3. Scroll either to the top or bottom of the page and click Save changes.

Then, as long as the post author has set a correct language for their post, the public timelines will only include posts in the languages you’ve chosen. So, when you yourself post on Vivaldi Social, make sure you also select the correct language for your posts. The default post language can be changed in Preferences > Other > Posting Defaults > Posting Language.

Tip #150

Join Vivaldi Social to connect with people from all over the fediverse.

You might be thinking, what’s a fediverse? Fediverse is an open network of communities committed to a better way of communicating online and allowing for constant improvements. Vivaldi Social is a fediverse instance powered by Mastodon. It’s similar to other well known social networks, but there’s no singular owner, no surveillance capitalism and no tracking or profiling of users. You can read more about it on the Vivaldi Blog.

To join Vivaldi social:

  1. Go to https://vivaldi.social/.
  2. Log in with your Vivaldi account.
  3. Start browsing, posting and interacting with everyone.

Your username on Vivaldi Social will be generated from your Vivaldi account’s username like this – @[email protected]. To learn more about how to use Vivaldi Social, check out the new articles on Vivaldi Help.