DLTJ Now Uses Webmention and Bridgy to Aggregate Social Media Commentary

DLTJ Now Uses Webmention and Bridgy to Aggregate Social Media Commentary

When I converted this blog from WordPress to a static site generated with
Jekyll
in 2018, I lost the ability for readers to make comments.
At the time, I thought that one day I would set up an installation of
Discourse
for comments like
Boing Boing did in 2013
.
But I never found the time to do that.
Alternatively, I could do what NPR has done—
abandon comments on its site in favor of encouraging people to use Twitter and Facebook
—but that means blog readers don’t see where the conversation is happening.
This article talks about
IndieWeb
—a blog-to-blog communication method—and the pieces needed to make it work on both a static website and for social-media-to-blog commentary.
The IndieWeb is a combination of
HTML markup
and an
HTTP protocol
for capturing discussions between blogs.
To participate in the IndieWeb ecosystem, a blog needs to support the »
h-card
» and »
h-entry
» microformats.
These microformats are ways to add HTML markup to a site to be read and recognized by machines.
If you follow the
instructions at IndieWebify.me
, the «Level 2» steps will check your site’s webpages for the appropriate markup.
The Jekyll theme I use here,
minimal-mistakes
, didn’t include the microformat markup, so I
made a pull request
to add it.
With the markup in place, dltj.org uses the
Webmention protocol
to notify others when I link to their content and receive notifications from others.
If you’re setting this up for yourself, hopefully someone has already
gone through the effort
of adding the necessary Webmention communication bits to your blog software.
Since
DLTJ
is a static website, I’m using the
Webmention.IO service
to send and receive Webmention information on behalf of dltj.org and a Jekyll plugin called
jekyll-webmention_io
to integrate Webmention data into my blog’s content.
The plugin gets that data from webmention.io, caches it locally, and builds into each article the list of webmentions and
pingbacks
(another kind of blog-to-blog communication protocol) received.
Webmention.IO and jekyll-webmention_io will capture some commentary.
To get comments from Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook, and elsewhere, I added the Bridgy service to the mix.
From their
About page
: «Bridgy periodically checks social networks for responses to your posts and links to your web site and sends them back to your site as webmentions.»
So all of that commentary gets fed back into the blog post as well.
I’ve just started using this Webmention/Bridgy setup, so I may have some pieces misconfigured.
I’ll be watching over the next several blog posts to make sure everything is working.
If you notice something that isn’t working, please reach out to me via one of the mechanisms listed in the sidebar of this site.