Hello all --
I use Webmentions on my own tilde.club website. https://tilde.club/~artlung/ - I have an include file that caches them. I have it set up so if I see a new one then I'll delete the cache file on tilde.club and do that manually.
Happy to answer questions about that in GitHub if there are any. https://github.com/artlung/artlung-tilde-club
Have a great week,
Joe -- Joe Crawford · Web Developer · +1.805-857-3951 · San Diego · https://artlung.com/
On Sat, Jun 28, 2025 at 9:08 AM Alan Schussman alan@schussman.com wrote:
This is a great use for webmentions, too. I'm now using https://webmention.io for this on a blog, but previously had my own home-rolled script to receive and store them. The mechanic is honestly a lot like barnold's proposal: You can hit a service to make the webmention request (with curl or other method), make your comment and do something like $ mention comment.txt https://<remote_comment_url> with a webmention CLI (there are a bunch).
If you don't want to use javascript to display the replies from webmention.io, you can use a cron job to periodically poll, download and build a local store of replies.
alan
On 28 Jun 2025, at 6:48, jmcs wrote:
Hi there,
On Sat, 28 Jun 2025, barnold@tilde.club wrote:
After admiring a club web page such as, say, http://tilde.club/~barnold/ , you want to make a comment to say how wonderful it is.
In your account on club, you create a text file comment.txt saying "Love your page!". Then at a shell prompt you run
$ ~barnold/bin/make-comment comment.txt
which adds the contents of your comment.txt to a comment page, say http://tilde.club/~barnold/comments.html . Since you were logged in at club, your comment is automatically attributed to you.
I'm not aware of anything exactly like this. It's not a bad idea as such, but it'd require some coordination among everyone involved.
- all the users would need to have a comments.html page with the same
format
- this hypothetical script would have to accept several params: user
you are commenting to, maybe url you are commenting about (is it a comment
to the page, a blog post...?)
- html could make this a bit messy: this script would have to insert
some text not at the end of a page, but before any </body> or whatnot
I guess the need to coordinate all of this might be the reason people would most likely set up their own guestbook (that often don't require abandoning the browser to make a comment)
I like the idea of it being "internal" to a particular tilde, and using the username to signify authory directly, but I'm not sure what sort of comitee you'd need to coordinate this
a simpler system would be to have a file somehwere with maybe this format (writable by everyone?):
URL_YOU_ARE_COMMENTING (space) date? (space) user (space) message
and, everyone that wanted to show messages in a page could add a bit of cgi doing "grep (^current_url) /var/www/this/file_that_saves_comments"
... it would have fewer moving parts, maybe
I don't know, I like thinking out loud :D. Maybe there's already something I'm not aware of, let's see
Does such a thing already exist? If not, is there any show-stopper that makes it infeasible?
Thanks,
-- barnold http://tilde.club/~barnold/ Saigon 17:32 ICT ► 25.0°C ◆ Clouds ◆ 28Km/h W ◆ 94% RH
Regards, jmcs