Adding Web Mentions to My Blog
Fostering community and conversation on your personal site is challenging, how do we unify engagement across the vast web?
Enter Webmentions, a web standard that can integrate social interactions from across the web onto your site.
From the W3C
A Webmention is a notification that one URL links to another. For example, Alice writes an interesting post on her blog. Bob then writes a response to her post on his own site, linking back to Alice’s original post. Bob’s publishing software sends a Webmention to Alice notifying that her article was replied to, and Alice’s software can show that reply as a comment on the original post.
Sending a Webmention is not limited to blog posts, and can be used for additional kinds of content and responses as well. For example, a response can be an RSVP to an event, an indication that someone “likes” another post, a “bookmark” of another post, and many others. Webmention enables these interactions to happen across different websites, enabling a distributed social web.
Standards like these help us work towards engaging with the world on our own terms and aligns well with the philosophy of the IndieWeb.org
We should all own the content we’re creating, rather than just posting to third-party content silos. Publish on your own domain, and syndicate out to silos. This is the basis of the ‘Indie Web’ movement.
Webmention is an open web standard (W3C Recommendation) for conversations and interactions across the web, a powerful building block used for a growing distributed network of peer-to-peer comments, likes, reposts, and other responses across the web. https://indieweb.org/Webmention
To set it up, I created a new component called WebMention that I could drop into any blog post I want to include web mentions on. At first I tried to implement this myself and then I gave up and used some services to help me. Building a custom service out just wasn’t in the cards for me. I found Jan Monsh’s blog post to help me through the process.
- Sign up for webmentions.io (add rel=‘me’ to a social link on your domain and sign in)
- add webmention endpoint to your head.
<link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/mattcool.tech/webmention" /> - use the endpoint in your webmention.io dash to display mentions.
Next I would like to take a look at bridgy to connect my social media but I’ll have to save that for another time!