My world on the web
Chris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)IndieWeb and Webmentions plugin for WordPress FTW!
I don’t think I’d used it before or really seen it happening in the wild, but Khurt Williams used his website to reply to one of my posts via Webmention. I was then able to write my reply directly within the comments section of my original post…
I still want to know how to bake more code into my responses/posts etc. Is it something that you handcraft or put into the theme?
I remember when I thought I had my head around WordPress and blogging. Then I found the IndieWeb and realised I had sold myself a lie.
Aaron, it is in fact with the Threaded Comment plugin (though it’s a GitHub repo and not in the main repository). A few people have asked me about it in the last couple of days, so instead of writing it out multiple times, I’ve done it once. Here are the details: Threaded Replies and Comments with Webmentions in WordPress. I’d had it ages ago and disabled it because I couldn’t quite get it to work (or it didn’t do what I expected), and didn’t really have instructions, so sadly I gave up. Now that I know what it was meant for and how to use it, I don’t know how I lived without it before.
Thank you for explaining the process behind it. I know that you mention the hope that the process and plugin will improve, I wondering if you have any thoughts or advice for making this workflow smoother as it currently exists? Do you just a text file with random chunks of code that you regularly use or do you use a template? I think that this is my next step in regards to webmentions, adding more content to my links.
Sorry for the confusion . What I meant about ‘adding contentu’ is in regards to h-cards. I tried using your invisible code – #8203 – to bake in categories into my post. I also like the idea of adding a h-summary to each post on my main blog.
I am assuming that some of this is best done through the theme, that is what I am unsure about.
For example, when you comment it includes things like syndicated links. Is that the theme or something you do manually?
Hope that makes sense.
P.S. Your comment did not come through in the thread. My webmentions playing up once again …
It could easily have been my fault for the comment not pushing through. I’m still working out some issues, but I’m trying my best; sometimes it’s guesswork if people are moderating contents in which case I can’t quite tell if things went through. I can manually syndicate, just to make sure; you’ll just have to excuse/delete the duplicates.
I think a lot of the things you’re talking about are often best baked directly into your theme or at worst perhaps using a plugin and/or widget if they’re easier. I know the IndieWeb Plugin has an h-card widget, but I wanted some more control, so I made my own by hand and dumped the code into the widget that appears on my homepage. I just used the typical WordPress widget system and dumped it into the sidebar area for my homepage.
As for summaries, you typically add them as sub-microformats to things like h-entry. Thus you’d want to add something like p-summary instead of the older entry-summary or e-summary. I think that some of this was being worked on in Independent Publisher already, but haven’t noticed if it’s being actively used in the current version. Often many themes will use the WordPress “Excerpt” field in the admin UI to add a summary which would have this microformat on it for use elsewhere whether it’s displayed or hidden within the page source for open graph data which is used by Twitter or Facebook. The p-summary would typically be added by the theme itself depending on where it’s used.
I could have sworn that the Independent Publisher Theme used and displayed WordPress’s built in categories and tags details for posts, so that should cover your needs there hopefully.
The syndication links on comments are a hidden bit of functionality and aren’t documented well (or at all?). I recall stumbling across the functionality myself. The syndication links plugin definitely adds the functionality, and depending on how the comment is received, it can sometimes display them automatically. Generally however, I’m often syndicating things I write in comments manually to Twitter (often using it as a notifications system for those without webmention support). Then I’ll go to the particular comment I syndicated and “edit” it, either by using the admin UI directly at
/edit-comments.phpor by clicking on the “edit” button on the public facing comment on the particular page. Then scrolling down that page you’ll find the Syndication Links meta box which will allow you to manually add the link! Eventually plugins like Bridgy Publish might automate some of this better, but for now, that’s where it’s hiding.Thank you for the tips. I will have a tinker. I think that in the end what you highlight is that if you want it done well then it takes effort and work.