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I have been working on some cool stuff behind the scenes of gRegorLove.com. My last post was a test of federated commenting. This means I can post a note on my site, indicate it is in response to another site, and a notification of my note is sent automatically. If the site supports the protocol, it can then pull in my author information and the text, displaying it just like any other comment.

It was a pretty successful first test. I was missing some markup in my post, so my author information and photo do not display on Laurent's post. That was easy to fix, though. Since my post has a title, that was displayed instead of the comment text. That is expected behavior, though, and won't be a problem once I add a “notes” page with shorter, status-like entries that do not typically have a title.

This may not seem that impressive by itself, but it is a core component in the move toward owning the content we create online and not relying on third-party sites. Remember, those sites can easily disappear.

I learned of this tool through Indie Web Camp. I have really enjoyed getting involved with this community. They are developing tools to help everyone get the same utility of social sites without needing to lock up our content. Own your data—that's what the “indieweb” movement is about. I want to help develop these type of tools.

More Technical Information

This protocol is called webmention. It functions similarly to pingback, but without the annoying XML-RPC.

I'm using webmention.io to automatically convert pingbacks I receive into webmentions.

Microformats are used to mark up each post's title, content, and author information. This allows the recipients of webmentions to easily parse the content and display it, if they decide to do so.

Each of my posts can now receive webmentions, too. They are processed asynchronously. They are not displayed anywhere on my site currently, but I plan to have them displayed along with other comments left directly on the site.