Introduction
Maybe all readers of this blog (very few people) already know what Webmention is, but if for any reason someone else happens to stumble upon this site, then I will explain a little bit.
Webmention is a web standard for mentions and conversations across the web, a powerful building block that is used for a growing federated network of comments, likes, reposts, and other rich interactions across the decentralized social web
So, in other words, Webmentions allow blogs to send message to each other when there is a link in the pinging one pointing to the linked one, the linked one may display that mention at the end of the page, thus creating some form of conversation.
Learning to implement it
I am still learning about this Webmention thing, it is a great thing, but I find it hard it to be widely implemented any time soon, because is not easy to implement.
Since my involvement with this and the indie web, after reading this, this and this. I decided I wanted to have it on my website too. I first thought it was just a thing of having Mastodon as a comment system.
After Basil implemented it on their site and blogging about it, I wanted to have it, thankfully Basil helped me did the implementation of it on my site.
The first implementation
I now understand what Basil did, he made Brid.gy pull all Mastodon replies to my posts with links to my blog, and then send them to Webmention.io, then with some JavaScript lines he wrote for me, pulled all of that and showed it on my site.
That is great, but all my webmentions are stored at someone else database, Webmention.io in this case, not the best scenario for me, also I have to rely on Brid.gy to send Mastodon comments to my links and send them as webmentions.
New implementation
I am now using Webmentiond by Horst Gutmann, I followed his setting instructions, but could not make it work, I am sure it is because something is not well configured on my Nginx server. I have tried different options and none of them worked. I wanted to make it work as a subfolder of my blog, actually at /webmentions/ folder, just like in the tutorial. But I couldn’t.
I asked Yarmo for a little help, knowing he has it working, he kindly sent me the way he has it implemented, Yarmo is using a subdomain instead of a subfolder, as soon as I saw his message on Mastodon, I felt a little bit fool, why I did not think about it myself?
Well, I have webmentiond working on my server and I will have all webmentions to my blog stored in a database on my server, I prefer it that way.
Next tasks
What are the next steps?
I want now to implement Mastodon comments on my site by scanning my Mastodon instance, instead of using bridgy, I know that is possible, is only that I do not know how to do it, I am already studying JavaScript, in order to see other people implementation of this, and be able to understand the code and modify it to fit my needs. (Yes Basil, I am watching at your code)
I hope to be able to have this implemented in less than a month.
Final Words
I really enjoy tweaking things, even those that already work, I always want to make it work better, and while I am still learning about Indie Web, I am enjoying the community, and I enjoy my weekends implementing these changes in my blog.