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.
Does such a thing already exist? If not, is there any show-stopper that makes it infeasible?
Thanks,
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
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
Another alternative would be to use email. You could write a script that sends an email formatted in a specific way. E. g. using a subject like "Re: https://tilde.club/~barnold/some-page.html" to comment on "https://tilde.club/~barnold/some-page.html". Then you could provide a script that tilde.club users can invoke like this:
comment https://tilde.club/~barnold/some-page.html <comment.txt
This script would send an email with the correct subject line and receiver address (in this case "barnold@tilde.club" as the page lives below "https://tilde.club/~barnold/") that contains the desired comment as the email body. You could then handle such emails automatically – either via sieve rules or via a cron job – to add those comments to your website. You would be entirely free to add them wherever you want. To a separate "comments.html" page. To the bottom of the page that has been commented on. Or somewhere else entirely. You could also handle comments differently depending on who sent the email in question. You could decide to "trust" comments coming from the tilde.club domain while you decide to review comments coming from other domains. Or maybe you want to keep comments coming from other domains entirely private?
Using email you would essentially provide a (very simple) standard and a single reference implementation. Other people could write other implementations. Maybe some want to add a mailto link like this one to their pages to provide better integration with the commenter's Desktop Environment or Smartphone:
mailto:barnold@tilde.club?subject=Re:%20https:%2F%2Ftilde.club%2F...
Furthermore, by relying on email as the transport medium, the "comment" script mentioned above would automatically work for all tilde.club users. Even for those that did not set up any kind of automated comment handling. Some users (you maybe?) might set up automated comment handling. Users that don't would simply receive comments in their email inbox. They could then add them to their website manually. Or maybe they decide to keep comments private and just read them. Maybe they even reply.
One last note: Commenting in this way would also work just as well for gopherholes and gemini capsules. You would simply change "https" to whatever protocol is used to serve the page in question.
On Sun, 29 Jun 2025, Frank Seifferth wrote:
Another alternative would be to use email. You could write a script that sends an email formatted in a specific way. E. g. using a subject like "Re: https://tilde.club/~barnold/some-page.html" to comment on "https://tilde.club/~barnold/some-page.html". Then you could provide a script that tilde.club users can invoke like this:
[...]
One last note: Commenting in this way would also work just as well for gopherholes and gemini capsules. You would simply change "https" to whatever protocol is used to serve the page in question.
Well, I like this idea as well. It adds very little friction, and as you say, everyone on ~club has already an inbox setup and ready to receive comments (quite likely everyone on other tildes too)
To be honest, I like this idea better than mine :).
On 2025-06-29 17:39 ICT, Frank Seifferth wrote:
Another alternative would be to use email. You could write a script
Yes, that's an appealing idea!
either via sieve rules or via a cron job – to add those comments to your
Oh, I hadn't considered cron. Or incron perhaps, to avoid polling. About sieve, I vaguely knew that in principle sieve rules can invoke programs. But how to set it up... I found
https://doc.dovecot.org/main/core/plugins/sieve_extprograms.html
which I have to confess looks daunting to me. Deepend (I guess) would have to do the configuring and I'd be useless for help.
Furthermore, by relying on email as the transport medium, the "comment" script mentioned above would automatically work for all tilde.club users.
Users that don't would simply receive comments in their email inbox.
A good feature.
One last note: Commenting in this way would also work just as well for gopherholes and gemini capsules. You would simply change "https" to whatever protocol is used to serve the page in question.
Another good feature! Email has nice features for this, for sure.
Thank you for your thoughts.
I just pursued the email-commenting idea a bit further and put together a few quick scripts. Initial testing suggests that the scripts might actually work. For those interested, you can
On 2025-06-30 21:39 ICT, Frank Seifferth wrote:
I just pursued the email-commenting idea a bit further and put together a few quick scripts. Initial testing suggests that the scripts might actually work. For those interested, you can
git clone https://tilde.club/~seifferth/repos/mailcomment/
Thanks!
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".
I'm afraid that might be "above my pay grade", as they say! E.g. I couldn't figure out whether "site" would mean tilde.club or could mean e.g. tilde.club/~barnold.
Thanks for your thoughts.
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
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
On 2025-06-28 20:48 ICT, jmcs wrote:
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.
Oh, that sounds more ambitious than what I had in mind. I was imagining just some script for my own public_html.
- 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 think a simpler form might be doable, e.g. just a single comment page at ~barnold/comments.html. Taking care of permissions might not be easy. The commenter would write to a "well known" location in their home directory perhaps, e.g. ~jmcs/barnold-comment.txt. Incorporating that comment into my page would have to run as me I think, for safety, so perhaps triggered with a signal. Not sure. Seems like there's no cut-and-dried thing to do this.
Thanks for your thoughts.
tildeclub@lists.tildeverse.org
-
Alan Schussman -
barnold＠tilde.club -
Frank Seifferth -
jmcs -
Joe Crawford