On 29 Jun 2025, at 18:09, barnold@tilde.club wrote:

On 2025-06-28 23:08 ICT, Alan Schussman wrote:

This is a great use for webmentions, too. I'm now using
https://webmention.io for this on a blog

I took a look at that and I'm not sure I can understand what it does!
If I understood correctly, which is doubtful, it's for this situation,

Alice makes a comment on site B that mentions site A.

Site B has some configuration that sends a "webmention" to site A.

Site A show something on a page saying "we were mentioned on site B".

That's the gist of it! The comment or reply is just another web page with a link to the target. The link is the way the webmention tool knows what target to assign the webmention to. When site B's webmention service sends a notice to site A's webmention service, that target service does a small amount of validation and then stores the record of the second page site linking back to it.

The easiest way to support webmentions is to use an external service and embed a bit of javascript into your page. When your page loads, that javascript essentially asks the service, "hey, what mentions link to this page?" and returns that content in a list.

they say! E.g. I
couldn't figure out whether "site" would mean tilde.club or could mean
e.g. tilde.club/~barnold.

Either works. All the owner of a page needs to do is include a webmention endpoint in their header that points to the service they're using. After setting up an account at webmention.io, mine is:

<link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/prettygoodhat.com/webmention" />

This same endpoint could be used for multiple sites you own, even at different domains. So you could set up just ~barnold/guestbook.html to receive webmentions, or you could include it in the header of every page on your site, if you wanted to receive mentions everywhere. Once you're collecting mentions, displaying them is a little more work. Happy to share the javascript I use to fetch a page's mentions from webmention.io if you're interested.

cheers,
Alan