Using Webmentions As A Commenting System 🔗

In my Previous Blogpost I explained what webmentions were, how to set them up, and how to display mentions on your own static blog. You may recall that I wanted to use this as more than a way to see you were mentioned, but also as a way to see comments left on your blog. If you click the above link, you may notice something new there. Check out the picture below:

Webmentions? 🔗

What they are 🔗

Chances are, unless you read a lot of random blogs and/or into the whole “indie web” thing, you haven’t heard of webmentions. According to Wikipedia:

Webmention is a W3C recommendation that describes a simple protocol to notify any URL when a website links to it, and for web pages to request notifications when somebody links to them.

And that’s basically it. When you link to someone elses blog, if they have webmentions, they will get notified. And if someone links to yours it works the same. You can also display webmentions made by other people on your own blog to use it as a way to see who is linking to your blog. It can also be used as a rudimentary comment system by tagging your post content with specific classes. You can see an example of webmentions in action as a comment system by looking at this blog post underneath the main blog content.

How I Got Here 🔗

I’ve been a Linux user for almost ten years now. For the first 5 years it was only on servers, then for the last 5 years it was on desktops as well as servers. I’ve tried out various distributions, messed up plenty of installs, and fixed some of those mess ups. Overall I would say that the experience has shaped how I use computers today. At the moment, my main desktop is an Arch Linux install. I don’t think it’s really much of a flex to do the arch install it’s easy, I just like having up to date software available as soon as possible.