Switching Away from Webmentions

Webmentions? What are those?

At the bottom of each of my blog posts, you may have noticed in the past a section called ‘webmentions’. This was how I previously served interactions on my post; they’re a neat bit of technology that effectively associated each post with a syndicated post on one of my social media platforms. This meant that if you replied to a post on, say, Bluesky linking to my article, your reply would show up as a comment on my blog. Pretty neat!

Why Use Them at All?

Well, first and foremost, I thought they were pretty cool. But beyond that, my website is a static site. It is hosted on Github Pages, meaning any sort of live updating has to be handled via a separate server. When I first begun my webhosting journey, I was unaware of any easy to set up free solutions; and I did not want to pay for one of the many services that provided comments. The reason I didn’t want to pay is pretty simple; I don’t expect to get a ton of engagement on my posts anyway, so why pay for a service that only three people will ever interact with? Webmentions were free, albeit a bit difficult to set up – but it was a fun challenge, and I learned quite a bit.

What Changed?

I discovered something called isso. This is a self-hosted comments provider that I can run from my own home server. In fact, it’s running in a docker container on my server right now. At first, I was reticent to expose any services on my home server to the wider internet. However, thanks to some tunnels and reverse proxying, I feel more comfortable doing so now, at the very least for something small-scale like this. Comments will have to be approved before they appear, just to keep some control over my content, but I get an e-mail notification when you comment so it should not take too long for me to approve any appropriate comments. My guestbook is also powered by isso, with the same approval system.

But I Want to Send Webmentions!

You still can! My website will still receive webmentions, it just won’t display them anymore. I might do something with them down the road – maybe enable showing likes and reposts, but not replies, or perhaps allowing people to post their own articles in response to my own. Regardless, for now, I want to focus just on isso.

And Another Thing…

I’m considering switching my blog’s theme off of Papermod and into something more modular. I plan on having more static (non-article) pages on my blog, such as a gallery of commissioned art, a list of projects, and so on, and while Papermod is a lovely theme, I’m not exactly sure it’s well-suited to anything other than a standard homepage and a list of articles. That said, it would be quite a project to move my modified shortcodes and templates (which were made using Papermod as a base) into a different theme!

That’s It?

I realize it’s been almost two months since my last post, and for that I am sorry. I’ve been busy with life, including a new job, and I’ve been trying to avoid burnout. That said, thank you for sticking with me, and please watch this space for more!