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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!
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