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webmentions and microsub | |
December 23rd, 2019 | |
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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. | |
[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]. | |
[1] Webmentions | |
[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. | |
[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. | |
[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! |