Aaron DavisI really love the idea of webmentions, they seem to return us to the earlier days of the web, where conversation spanned sites. It also feel much more of an acknowledgement to get a mention on someones own site as opposed to a social media silo.
I’ve already turned off the moderation of webmentions here, they get published immediately.
As Aaron’ says the solution is technical. Even the basic use of webmentions take a step or two more than just setting up a blog.
I notice mentions from some folk come through as mentions but don’t link to the post they come from. I do get the full post via email notification, so they must be sending all the information,but either my blog is not handling it correctly or they are not formatted in a way the blog understands.
This is still the big problem with the Indieweb: it’s too complicated for most people to worry about.
Are you using the Semantic Linkbacks plugin? This adds more detail to the database about the individual mentions but there is often a degree of theme tweaking required to get the different types displaying correctly.
Obviously, we want the different types (plain mention, like, reply, etc.) presented in the best way. For my blog I had to add custom code to my comments page and the callback function used by the theme to account for the different types and pull the relevant attributes from the database including the additional meta added by Semantic Linkbacks.
Far too much trouble for most.
Hi Colin,
I am using the ‘Semantic Linkbacks plugin’ but I’ve not looked at the database or what it does at all. This theme, sempress seems to handle a fair bit.
As you say a lot of trouble, but you are blazing a trail and it is one that has a map provided by the IndieWeb. I am hoping that eventually this (or something like it) will be the standard way of blogging and adding conversation to blogs. My next step is to better understand what is going on rather than just activate plugins and see what happens.
Until Indieweb support is baked into core WordPress isn’t going to be the answer but there seems to be a reluctance to go this route.
… and no doubt, WithKnown is doing something else(?)
@johnjohnston are you picking up [web]mentions from micro.blog?
@cn yes I am. Although I had to moderate that one. Need to look at my functions.php. Got the one from known too.
@johnjohnston probably the brackets
Thanks John for your thoughts. The response I got elsewhere in regards to adding code was:
Someone would need to lobby WP to allow web mentions? Not many people will manually add the code to their theme
I think that this is important and wonder if webmentions will ever be whitelisted (assuming that is what is required.)
Interestingly though, this post/webmention did not actually come through. I came upon it via RSS and manually pinged my site. Not sure what is up, but all your comments come via Jetpack it would seem, not via email or any other method. Also, when I go to your blog the posts are not actually included in the main theme. I had to go to 2017 to find them.
Might be my site? Might be yours? Might be related to micro.blogs? Really not sure.
Hi Aaron,
Yes, I think we need to hope that webmentions get added in to WordPress. As the indieweb (webmentiosn, microformats) stuff seems to be getting adopted by the W3C I guess this will become more likely?
I think whitlisting webmentions will only be necessary until they become more frequent and Akismit understands them?
My comments, coming via Jetpack, is a mystery to me. I thought webmentions should be sent automatically. As you say, “really not sure”. I’ll try filling in the webmention field on your posts next time.
I guess my approach to the indieweb is, “this is the way things should work”, I hope it gets easier.
As to finding this post, my front page only shows Article format posts, likes, status, photos ect all end up on the http://johnjohnston.info/blog/type/status/ page. I am still thinking & rethinking about how my blog should be organised…
I really liked Colin Walker’s point:
> Until Indieweb support is baked into core WordPress isn’t going to be the answer but there seems to be a reluctance to go this route.
Needing to manually ping other sites is not going to achieve that.
I collected some thoughts and reflections on my own tribulations [here](https://readwriterespond.com/2017/11/zen-art-blogging-maintenance/). I am just confused why the mentions are not even coming through to my spam? What is even more confusing is when I tried to manually add your [comment](http://johnjohnston.info/blog/%f0%9f%91%8d-co-claiming-and-gathering-together-developing-read-write-collect/) to my [‘Co-claiming’](https://readwriterespond.com/2017/12/read-write-collect/) post, it gave me an error. Who knows what is going on. Maybe the error log has something, not sure.
Hi Aaron,
I am completely with Colin and yourself, I am just hoping that this will all work out properly in the end. In the meantime I am happy kicking types I don’t fully understand;-) The main purpose of the blog is not changed by the experimenting. I’ve found that shorter posts here make for a happier me that tweets do. (I continue to use twitter too though).
BTW I suspect that emoji in my url was the problem I used the id for the post and submitted http://johnjohnston.info/blog/?p=6382 to your webmention form and that gave me a positive result. I’ve been using emoji to indicate likes, as I didn’t like the way post kinds add the heart, but it looks like I might need a better way…