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---------------------------------------- webmentions and microsub December 23rd, 2019 ---------------------------------------- This phlog is about web stuff. Specifically it's about Indyweb things and microformats. I use my website https://tomasino.org as an IndieAuth [0] portal. When logging into sites that understand the IndieWeb concept, I provide my "Home" URL as an identifier. Then the site scrubs through all the various links I have on that page and picks out those that it can understand for authentication. In most cases I get GPG and GitHub hits, though occasionally a site will support more. I oAuth in, and bam... identified. It's pretty neat and requires very little effort on my side. HTML [0] IndieAuth There are much fancier IndieWeb doodads though, and I wanted to start taking advantage of some. In particular Webmentions had drawn my attention. It's a different way to handle commenting that, honestly, reminds me of what we do here in gopherspace. Instead of leaving a comment on a post somewhere, you just write your own blog post and "notify" the original. The original page can then choose whether to add a link to yours or ignore it or whatever. Everyone maintains control of their own words and all is well! So I opened up the IndieWeb sites and went digging into Webmentions [1]. I was immediately reminded why I abandonded this the last time around. While the concept is incredibly simple, the implementation is annoyingly complex and the terminology for things is as bad as git [2]. HTML [1] Webmentions HTML [2] Git Man Page Generator Since my sites are all static I wasn't looking for a plugin or even something that automatically displayed anything on the front-end at all. I just wanted something to process webmentions and give me a way to see that they happened. For my low traffic sites, a Webmention-to-Email system would have been perfect. There are a number of things out there already. Some support the Webmention client role and others the server because--did I not mention this?--you need webmentions set up on both sides for it to work. So to actually do it you need reading, writing, discovery and parsing. There are a handful of projects doing the various points and most of them are "in development" to varying degrees. Almost all of them have complex esoteric documentation that only makes sense if you're already familiar with the protocol enough to write your own software. Lovely! There are a few 3rd party services that offer the basics without charge. I don't know if they work or not, but that's what I ended up trying. I really don't want to spend the whole Christmas break figuring this stuff out. I don't expect to get many, if any, mentions anyway. Webmention.io is the service I went with. I used IndieAuth to log in and then grabbed the links it gave me to paste on my various blogs. I have no idea how to "use" Webmentions from the other side, and no idea how to test if I'm set up correctly. I wonder if I need to IndieAuth with the blog URL itself and then use webmention.io directly to that property only and then repeat the process for the other site. It says I should be able to use it on many sites though, so hopefully it's fine. Time will tell. Webmention.io provides a microformat feed of the mentions you receive. I was going to grab the RSS one and plug it into my RSS reader until I noticed the mention of this other IndieWeb format, Microsub. Oh joy! Another one. :D Microsub seems like an abstraction layer above microformats that can be interpretted as feeds or notifications. RSS and Atom are valid inputs, but so are other bits. Like other IndieWeb things, there's a big push to separate client & servers. In this case I found Aperture [3] as a server and I'm using a couple different clients to see the front-end. HTML [3] Aperture Most of these projects are also "in development", but they seem functional enough that I was able to dupe my tt-rss contents over. As I mentioned in my last post [4], I'm looking for a replacement for that software anyway so maybe this will work out. DIR [4] Poisoning the Well Eventually I'd like to run all these services myself (though I have no desire to write the software to do so myself). I have nginx running on this webserver already so if I can dockerize the bits & pieces together into an IndieWeb multi-container and reverse proxy everything that would be perfect. For now I'm putting a pin in it. Things are good enough. - - - - - Are any of you running IndieWeb goodness? Have thoughts or suggestions? Wanna vent? Send me a mention in the lovely gopher style!