Webmentions

As of this post, my website supports Webmention, an open web standard for federated web conversations. This means that you can reply to, mention or otherwise publicly acknowledge my posts in a variety of ways, and your acknowledgement will appear directly beneath the post in question. Technology! You can do this in one of three ways (possibly more):

Reply on your own website. This will require you to have a website that supports microformats and webmentions. There are plugins to enable this for various blogging engines, and you can also do it manually by hosting a page such as the following:

<div class="h-entry">
	<p>in reply to: <a class="u-in-reply-to" href="https://davidyat.es/YYYY/MM/DD/some-post/">David Yates</a></p>
	<p class="e-content">Your reply here!</p>
</div>

and then sending the webmention to this site by pasting the URL of your reply into the box at the bottom of the relevant blog post and pressing Send. Or you can use cURL, as below:

curl -i -d "source=https://yoursite/yourreply&target=https://davidyat.es/YYYY/MM/DD/some-post/" https://webmention.herokuapp.com/api/webmention

If you want to be named and avatar’d, make sure you have an h-card on the page as well, otherwise I’ll just show your domain.

You can also reply to the relevant post on Twitter. I always post new blog entries on Twitter. Any replies to those tweets will be shown as replies on the post page itself, courtesy of brid.gy. Due to changes in Twitter’s API enacted in April 2023, brid.gy no longer supports Twitter.

Finally, to reply anonymously without using your own site or Twitter account, you can use comment parade.

You can send webmentions to any URL on this site, but only webmentions of datestamped posts will be displayed. If there’s no date in the URL, mentions won’t be displayed, but I will still see them. ;)

Your refrigerator’s running, better go support its athletic aspirations!