Jeremy Felt's web

Now supporting Webmention

Published Monday late afternoon 🌔

I think? If you know how to send a Webmention, please do so that I know it works! 😂

I’ve installed the IndieWeb plugin as well as its companions, Webmention and Semantic-Linkbacks.

The IndieWeb plugin adds a few semantic things to the user profile in WordPress and acts as a launch platform for installing a bunch of other IndieWeb related plugins.

The Webmention plugin adds support for, imagine this, the Webmention protocol. This should enable support for sending and receiving mentions.

The Semantic-Linkbacks plugin treats Webmentions and other linkbacks as proper comments and formats things in a nice rich way.

I have added all of these, but I haven’t tested any of them yet. So this post should play the role of general announcement and playground.

Responses and reactions

Replies

  • Now that this site supports Webmentions, I’ve been having some fun digging into how I’d like them to be presented.

    The theme I’m using is very bare-bones. I created it using Underscores a couple years ago when I decided I had lost touch with the code I was using and for some reason wanted to get back in touch? I don’t know, but I like it.

    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.

    At the same time, I created another plugin specifically for adjustments to WordPress. I removed all default emoji handling to see if things would display better in feed readers and adjusted some of the markup output by default—sorry, Windows Live Writer.

    Back to comments.

    Before I started, the theme’s comment template output everything stored in the comments table as if it was a comment. This makes sense because WordPress doesn’t have a complete idea of “custom comment types”, so it treats them all the same.

    The first thing I did was break the query for all comments into comment types so that I could display them in separate sections. WordPress has a function that should do this, separate_comments(), but it is hard coded to support only comment, trackback, pingback, and pings. I have my eye on proposing a filter there, but I’m guessing there are wider concerns with comment types that need to be addressed at the same time.

    I’ll revisit that code in the near future. I was just winging it today and never actually went back to review some of those decisions. 🙂

    I’m starting with a section for “Likes”, a section for “Mentions”, and a section for “Replies”. Once I get more familiar with other actions and how I see them being used, I’ll likely mix things up a little more.

    For Likes and Mentions, I decided to keep things simple and display the avatar, name, action, and date. This displays a bit more than a facepile, but less than a full comment.

    It’s been interesting seeing what data actually comes along with a Like or a Mention—sometimes it’s the full post—and it’d be fun to figure out the right way to display that in the future. I could see manually editing some mentions and displaying them differently so that the context is displayed. I envision something like the first 100 characters before and after the actual mention itself.

    I removed support for comment navigation, as it’s something I don’t want to deal with right now and I have the option to paginate comments turned off in WordPress.

    I was low-key annoyed that wp_list_comments() only supported a style of ol or li, but then went further to the comment walker and saw div was also a supported option. I created a new trac ticket for that and tagged it as a good first bug for anyone who may want to contribute.

    My next annoyance is that comment author names are wrapped with <b> and so here I am deciding that of course I should add a custom walker. Exciting!

    Of course now I’ve screwed this all up somehow and the reply links aren’t working.

    Ahhh, I see! I tried to shrink the amount of markup used around each comment, but the default reply script used in WordPress expects a bit more structure. Added that back for now.

    I’ve temporarily adjusted the “Reply” text below each comment to “Reply to {comment author name}”. I think I’d like to adjust this even more so that on nested comments, it includes everyone’s name. Something like “Reply to Jeremy Felt, Alice, and Bob” on a thread in which all have participated would be cool. Part of me wants to shorten that to first names only, though that starts to make assumptions.

    One quirk now that I have this all in place is that I’ve replied to “mentions” in the past, which are now displayed in their own area of the page. These replies are now displayed outside of that context. I’m guessing this won’t be an issue in the future, though if I ever do want to reply to a mention, it’d be cool if there was a way to convert the mention into a reply for purposes of display. I’ll think some more on that.

    Almost there. Time for another bad decision.

    It looks like some multi-paragraph Webmentions are coming in or being stored without paragraph tags. Rather than dive into really testing that, I took the lazy way out and replaced single line breaks with double line breaks so that wpautop() can add paragraphs as intended. This seems to have worked, but I’m sure I’ll run into an edge case at some point.

    Okay! Theme deployed. Deployments setup for the new plugins. All is right.

    Version 0.0.2 of a new vibe for Webmentions is live on the site. 🕺🏻

    Reply

  • Now supporting Webmention by Jeremy Felt (Jeremy Felt)
    I think? If you know how to send a Webmention, please do so that I know it works!
    I’ve installed the IndieWeb plugin as well as its companions, Webmention and Semantic-Linkbacks.
    The IndieWeb plugin adds a few semantic things to the user profile in WordPress and acts as a launch platform for …
    Welcome, Jeremy.Share:TwitterFacebookTumblrEmailLike this:Like Loading…Related

    Reply

  • Congratulations on getting things up and running! Hopefully it wasn’t too complicated, though we could always use help as a community in making the UI and details easier. I know that David Shanske has been working on making a new pass to integrate Semantic Linkbacks into the Webmention plugin so that there’s only one plugin instead of two.
    As you get more reactions via Webmention (especially if you connect Brid.gy to get responses back to your website via Webmentions from Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Github, and Mastodon if you use them), you’ll likely want Semantic Linkbacks to facepile the smaller bits like favorites, bookmarks, likes, reads, etc. (I facepile all webmentions on my own site except for replies.)
    You should be able to find the Semantic Linkbacks Settings in /wp-admin/options-discussion.php.

    Reply

    • Thanks! I don’t think anything was too complicated, though there are plenty of things I want to customize about how this site generates, receives, and displays Webmention content. Right now I’m thriving on “it just works”, but I’m looking forward to geeking out on the code and finding places to contribute.

      I do have the Semantic Linkbacks plugin activated, though I need to spend some more time with it. I also created this site’s current theme a while ago with the intent to spend more time crafting things like comments. It’s markup and styling for things has plenty of room for improvement. Now is a perfect opportunity!

      Reply

  • Liked Now supporting Webmention by Jeremy Felt (jeremyfelt.com)

    I think? If you know how to send a Webmention, please do so that I know it works!
    I’ve installed the IndieWeb plugin as well as its companions, Webmention and Semantic-Linkbacks.
    The IndieWeb plugin adds a few semantic things to the user profile in WordPress and acts as a launch platform for …

    Hooray! Congratulations!

    Syndicated copies to:

    Reply

  • Welcome to using WebMention, Jeremy. Still figuring out how to best use it myself with regard to how they get displayed on my site.
    Like you I use WordPress, and I would love for mentions to display more like the old pingbacks, where you’d get a snippet from the mentioning site from around where it links to you. Now it mostly is ‘site x mentioned this.’ which makes me click to get a notion if it’s relevant.
    On Webmention tweaks I documented some of the things I tried. The issue is that because the tweaks are in the Semantic Linkbacks plugin, not in the WP theme, you can only make those tweaks a permanent option if it gets rolled into the plugin (no such things as a child-plugin like with themes). And I’m not confident enough of my changes to figure out and try submitting them to the maintainers of the plugin.
    Replied to Now supporting Webmention by Jeremy Felt

    I think? If you know how to send a Webmention, please do so that I know it works!….I’ll need to do some spelunking to figure out how I want to display and style them

    Reply

    • Thanks, Ton!

      I’m building a nice list of things I want to happen now that the piping is working. While there is no such thing as a child plugin for WordPress, I’m looking forward to diving into the existing plugin code to look for filters (or contribute them if they aren’t there) that can be used to adjust on a site by site basis.

      I’d really like a way to clearly define what is sent with the Webmention (as the author of the reply) and what is displayed (as the owner of the receiving site. I’m guessing it’s there, I just need to go spelunking.

      Reply

    • Leave a Reply

    The only requirement for your mention to be recognized is a link to this post in your post's content. You can update or delete your post and then re-submit the URL in the form to update or remove your response from this page.

    Learn more about Webmentions.