Webmention: Simple web standard to notify any URL when mentioned across the web
webmention.net
webmention.net
And micropub:
Webmention + microformats + micropub = distributed social comments, likes, reshares, etc, with blogs.
> This is a similar "Linkback" mechanism to the ones of Refback, Trackback, and Pingback. It uses a different protocol, though, and thus should be discoverable through its own link relation type.
Spammers would then have to host the location where the spam is located, and then you can block them.
But, frankly, this isn't actually a solved problem yet. I'd imagine building a spam blocking engine on top of a service like webmention.io is an obvious next step if/when this becomes an issue.
Webmentions requires receiving x-www-form-urlencoded data. Why they chose this convoluted and complexity increasing way is beyond me. Embedding (or encoding) it in the URL string itself would've been infinitely easier for everyone with no downsides. But no, with x-www-form-urlencoded variables you need to actually be doing some dynamic scripting to handle it. If not actually some script listening for that location/endpoint then at least a series of complex nginx directives and modules to get x-www-form-urlencoded logged with all the rest of the request. This additional complexity makes running a static website that supports indieweb standards like a tail wagging the dog in terms of the webmentions receiver's relation to the static http site.
microformats2 h-entry markup is cool though. Just using class names for html elements to make some info parsing "standardized".
Yeah, it's a bit annoying having to integrate with a web service, but it's not that big of a deal.
And bluntly: most people running blogs aren't using a static site generator, anyway, so it really doesn't matter that much.
Anyway, how did you manage to receive webmentions and set up an enpoint? Are you passing it off to some dynamic scripting language to handle?
WordPress dominates the blogging world. Jekyll, Hugo, etc, are drops in the bucket by comparison. Winning that market over is absolutely required if Webmention is gonna gain any level of adoption.
http://webmention.io, which is a standard web service running separately from the blog itself, receives webmentions for me (it's a hosted service, though you can also self-host).
A Jekyll plugin pulls them down on site build, which I run periodically on a schedule.
I'm just too lazy to bother.
This is gonna be the case no matter how the content is passed in the request (I.e. url vs form encoding).
It's dynamic content.
What is your proposed solution for supporting dynamic content on a static site that doesn't involve running some kind of service on the side?
I implemented my website's (see profile) comment system based on a tiny perl script that tails the logs from my webserver. It's completely separate and no internet user is connecting to it. Any URL, followed by the string "/@say/" like, "http://what.ever/something.html/@say/Neat something" is added to the comment page.
What you've done is made the webserver a blanket endpoint, where the "API" and the "database" are your web server log files.
Practically speaking, what you have is a CGI script with a non-standard interface to the server. It's still subject to any bugs in your perl script, since you're still processing input from an untrusted location.
It's certainly clever, though!
If it were URL parameters you'd have them in your webserver log, but you'd still need dynamic code parsing that log for anything more advanced than "have a record of the mention somewhere".
How would you receive webmentions on one of these? It's two variables submitted as a POST as x-www-form-urlencoded data.