Tag: Webmentions

Bookmarked What we talk about when we’re talking about “Webmentions” by Marty McGuireMarty McGuire (martymcgui.re)

Maybe Webmention can be thought of as less of a “building block” and more like a glue. You can do so many things with glue, like combining a bunch of planks into a table, or building a parade float sculpture with papier-mâché, or doctoring the photo in a passport!

Marty McGuire attempts to reclaim what it is we talk about when we talk about webmentions. Whereas Chris Aldrich’s article unpacks what webmentions are and how to use them, McGuire explores some of the technical challenges and frictions. This includes different ways of implementing the specifications, such as via javascript and webmention.io.
Filed an Issue GitHub – pfefferle/wordpress-webmention: A Webmention plugin for WordPress (GitHub)

A Webmention plugin for WordPress. Contribute to pfefferle/wordpress-webmention development by creating an account on GitHub.

Today I discovered that all my self-pings had disappeared. On further investigation, I found that self pings on the same URL and domain had been ticked. I did not tick these, so assume that something might have happened in an update.

I have unticked the boxes now, but am now wondering what would be the best way to reinstate my self-pings. Maybe I am misusing the technology, but I use self pings to link to and build upon past posts.

Replied to Thoughts on Jeet Heer’s Can We Bring Back Blogging? by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)

Perhaps if everyone reads and writes from their own home on the web, they’re less likely to desecrate their neighbor’s blog because it sticks to their own identity?

There’s lots of work to be done certainly, but perhaps we’ll get there by expanding things, opening them up, and giving ourselves some more space to communicate?

Chris, I like your point about companies opening up, it reminds me Cory Doctorow’s discussion of interoperability as a means of fixing the internet.
Replied to Remote Comments (halfanhour.blogspot.com)

In order to comment, you need to enter two things: first, the comment itself, in the big comment field (I could probably have made that smaller, but I like long comments; none of this microcontent stuff for me).

And second, you need to enter the URL for comment submission on your own website. This is where your comment will actually be posted. This needs to be the exact URL (you can’t redirect it with a .htaccess, so I learned) and it needs to be able to accept a POST request.

Stephen, I kind of follow your explanation of ‘rcomments’, but the technical specifications are a bit beyond me. I just wonder how this differs from micropub clients?
Replied to Browser Bookmarklets for Giving Credit (boffosocko.com)

Create two bookmarks in your browser’s bookmark bar. Give them convenient names like “via” and “hat tip” and add the snippets of code respectively into the URL fields. On a site you want to give credit to, highlight the name of the author of the post and click the bookmarklet. You’ll see a pop up for some text which you can then cut and paste into your post to give the credit. You can obviously edit the text if necessary.

I am all in on this Chris, but I just can’t seem to get it to work. I created the bookmarklet, highlighted the name and clicked the bookmarklet, but there was no pop-up. I must admit, I do not use many bookmarklets, only Alan Levine’s really. I may therefore have to dig into this a bit further as it is probably me.
Replied to A checklist for how I’d like comments to work in WordPress by Jeremy Felt (jeremyfelt.com)

In current WordPress, the only way for a comment to remain private is for it to stay in an “unapproved” status. It would be nice if comments could flow more easily between unapproved, private, and public.

Ideally:

  • When someone leaves a comment, an option is available to submit the comment as private so that only the post author will see it.
  • When a post author moderates a comment, an option is available to make it private.
  • A post author has the ability to privately reply to a public or private comment within the WordPress admin.
Jeremy, I really like the idea of private comments. I guess this is a part of the wider discussion around private posts.
Replied to Deleting my Patreon account by Doug Belshaw (dougbelshaw.com)

What does this mean for Thought Shrapnel? I’m not sure. I want to keep something there, perhaps in a similar format to Aaron Davis’ Read Write Collect, or Tom Armitage’s Infovore. We’ll see.

Doug, it is funny thinking about my Read Write Collect site. In some ways I was inspired by you and your many sites.

Just when I thought I had enough sites, I decided to create another one. A feed that could be used in a platform like Micro.blog. My intent this time was to create a space where I could reclaim my pieces on the web. In part I was inspired by Tom Woodward’s API driven portfolio, as well as Alan Levine’s concept of co-claiming.

I was also interested in exploring the possibility of WordPress beyond the standard post format and the implications that this has with the choice of themes. Associated with this, I wondered if there was a possibility of automating the sharing of content created elsewhere, such as videos and images.

I have documented my workflow before, however this focused more on my long form writing. Here then is my attempt to summarise my workflow.

Clearly I collect pieces from around the web, including various newsletters. However, the majority of my content comes from Inoreader through which I have subscribed to my feeds. From there, I either respond or save posts to Pocket to read and respond later.

If I am responding on my phone, I use URL Forwarder to populate the Post Kinds field. On the laptop, I just create a new post in WordPress.

Although I have tinkered with Micropub clients, I have not found one that fits with what I want in a post. For example, I like have titles with emojis, therefore I actually populate the slug. John Johnston has some code to strip this out, but I am yet to tinker with this.

I really like the possibility using IFTTT and webhooks to generate posts from Pocket and Inoreader, which Chris Aldrich has documented here and here. However, that is still an itch.

In regards to writing my actual posts, I use Post Editor Button to add HTML snippets, such as embedding audio and adding in Microformats where required.

I also use a range of sites to capture quotes and evidence. Whether it be Hypothes.is, Diigo and Quotebacks. I know I should be more structured with this, but I am not.

In regards to POSSE, I use a range of methods, including SNAP, Bridgy for Micro.Blog. However, more often than note I manually write responses and add the corresponding link to my list of syndication links.

Hope that helps.

Replied to Outline for Webmentions in Conjunction with Academic Citations by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)

As an example, if Zeynep were to cite Tessie, then she could write up her citation in basic HTML with a few microformats and include a link to the original paper (with a rel=”canonical” or copies on pre-print servers or other journal repositories with a rel=”alternate” markup). On publishing a standard Webmention would be sent and verified and Tessie could have the option of displaying the citation on her website in something like a “Citation” section. The Post Type Discovery algorithm is reasonably sophisticated enough that I think a “citation” like this could be included in the parsing so as to help automate the way that these are found and displayed while still providing some flexibility to both ends of the transaction.

Thanks for this write-up Chris. It has me itching about salmentions and having webmentions passed along. I really want to have a link to my ReadWriteRespond posts on my Collect site to aid with linking. However, I was concerned about the implication in regards to Webmentions. Reading this post I am thinking that I would just need to put a syndication link on ReadWriteRespond and the webmention will flow back. Now to think about how I implement this.
Replied to Webmentions are strange, at least… — Bix Dot Blog (bix.blog)

Webmentions are strange, at least in how the WordPress plugin handles them, as they contain far less context about the pinging post — which is to say none whatsoever. Old-fashioned trackbacks and pingbacks at least include a snippet of the post which sent the ping. Webmentions are presented simply with, “This post was mentioned by whomever.” This does not seem especially helpful when such inter-blog links are meant to serve not just conversation but context on the web.

I find this most frustrating when linking to my own posts. I have taken to add class="u-in-reply-to" to display the ‘mentions’ are replies. However, this all depends on the post.
Replied to https://collect.readwriterespond.com/pcpopup2020-2/ by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (Read Write Collect)

What if people had some sort of ownership and control of their presence on the web?

What if we posted comments to other spaces from our own sites utilising the power of webmentions? Both keeping a record of our conversations, as well as owning our opinions.

#pcPopUp2020

Replied to Tantalising pursuit of webmentions by Jeremy CherfasJeremy Cherfas (jeremycherfas.net)

Over the past few days I have again picked up the torch of fully implementing webmentions in Grav. It’s a maddening pursuit, mostly because I don’t really know what I’m doing (although I am getting fantastic help from the folks in the IndieWeb community). The details are pretty arcane, and although …

Jeremy, I was just looking at the Eat This Podcast siteEat This Podcast site and noticed that many of your webmentions actually come from Instagram. I did not think that Brid.gyBrid.gy?
Replied to https://johnjohnston.info/blog/12157-2/ by john john (johnjohnston.info)

This is exciting Aaron, testing the reply feature on my desktop now.

HMM, I need to manually add the response properties in my blog. Not sure if that is due to your emoji in title or…

I know that emojis have been an issue in the past, however I manually remove it from the slug these days (see url https://collect.readwriterespond.com/indigenous-for-desktop/). The only emojis are in the title?

I think that you have touched upon my only concern/frustration with Micropub/sub Readers. They do not seem to populate Response Proporties box. Although it is far from ideal, I prefer to populate these and even add my own custom quote. I also lose control over the headings associated with responses, listens, likes etc … I agree to this as a standard, but there is a part of me that likes having a heading and an emoji to go with this. Each to there own I guess. My dream would be to be able to decide what fields are available, like a custom client that matches up with the various microformats.

Bookmarked How to Have a Conversation on the IndieWeb by Desmond RivetDesmond Rivet (desmondrivet.com)

In which I describe how to avoid solipsism on the #indieweb

Desmond Rivet walks through both the process and code required to converse via the IndieWeb. Although there are some great summaries of Webmentions and the IndieWeb, Rivet concisely breaks down microformats and how they work.
Replied to

I am really interested in your questions Lucas, “Do you get enough reply posts to make the setup worthwhile?” I think it is important to be mindful about expectation. Webmentions are useful for capturing interactions from Twitter and other sites that support them. However, as Khurt Williams highlights, they still have limitations. Personally speaking, for sites that do not have webmentions, I usually cut and paste from my own site. First and foremost, I do this for me. Having said all that, I still think that webmentions is the most interoperable form of commenting on the web. They have revolutionised my web experience.
Replied to Manual Backfeed in the Blogosphere by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)

Sometimes when using my own website to reply to another that doesn’t support the W3C’s Webmention spec, I’ll manually syndicate (a fancy way of saying cut-and-paste) my response to the website I’m responding to. In these cases I’ll either put the URL of my response into the body of my reply, or in sites like WordPress that ask for my website URL, I’ll use that field instead. Either way, my response appears on their site with my reply URL in it (sometimes I may have to wait for my comment to be moderated if the receiving site does that).

Here’s the important part: Because my URL appears on the receiving site (sometimes wrapped as a link on either my name or the date/time stamp depending on the site’s user interface choices), I can now use it to force future replies on that site back to my original via webmention! My site will look for a URL pointing back to it to verify an incoming webmention on my site.

Thank you for this Chris. I have been manually entering comments up until now, not aware that if I pasted in the reply url that it would add a webmention. This should also fix my issue with displaying refbacks.
Replied to Working through displaying Webmentions by Jeremy Felt (jeremyfelt.com)

I created a plugin specifically for my adjustments to the IndieWeb, Webmention, and Semantic Linkbacks plugins. There are a couple scripts and styles I decided I didn’t need as well as a custom comment walker I decided to remove.

I am really enjoying your working out loud Jeremy. It has me thinking about what some of the changes I could make to my site. In particular, I would rather show the name of the post for a mention, rather than which site the post in question was mentioned on.
Liked indiekit (indiekit)

The immediate goal of this project is to provide a Micropub endpoint that can be hosted on a service like Heroku, configured via files stored on a GitHub repo, and save posts back to that repo for publishing with a static site generator such as Eleventy, Hugo or Jekyll. The software is fully documented and tested.

A long term ambition is to build a tool that supports different publishing destinations, other social publishing specifications (Webmention, Microsub, ActivityPub etc.) and integrates with a range of content management systems.