Experimenting With Webmentions and Blogger

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I’m experimenting with some IndieWeb features on my Blogger blog, particularly webmentions.

Webmentions is a web standard for merging the reactions to a blog post across the web. The reactions typically appear as comments to the original post and link back to the sources.

I followed the IndieWeb Blogger tutorials for adding to my blog an h-card microformat and support for webmentions. It’s pretty easy. For example, adding webmentions through Brid.gy requires adding just one line of code to the blog’s template.

I originally set up Brid.gy to listen to webmentions from Twitter.

This works great but, when a tweet has a link to a post of my blog, the full text of the tweet is published as a comment. Copying all the text of other users’ tweets makes me uneasy, especially considering those users may not be aware of it. Therefore, I turned off listening to webmentions from Twitter and deleted the Twitter reactions Brid.gy had initially added as comments to my posts.

The blog is still listening to webmentions coming from elsewhere on the web. Adding support for webmentions to blogs and other sites takes deliberate action, so I assume those who do are okay with how webmentions work.

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