If you’ve been online and had a blog in the heydays of blogging and the blogosphere, you probably somehow stumbled across Pingback and Trackback. Both allow owners of blog A to notify blog B if one of A’s articles links to an article on B.
A couple of months ago I stumbled across Webmention which is basically a re-implementation of Pingback without the XML-RPC part (yes, XML-RPC, …) so, in theory, it should be less of a pain to implement. I also saw what could be done with Webmentions thanks to (among others) Aaron Parecki’s blog where he exposes a simple form so that people can add mentions even if their websites don’t support Webmentions natively.
Since I wanted to get to know the protocol itself, I started implementing my own little Webmention receiver and server and during FOSDEM last weekend I finally switched it on for zerokspot.com. So, if you want to send me Webmentions, you can do so now! All mentions are moderated through a simple web-interface, so there will be a delay between you sending a mention and me approving it being rendered on zerokspot.com 😉
And if you don’t and nobody else does, then at least I had some fun playing with the protocol! There are still lots of things I want to improve there (like a better rendering here AND a simple form to send Webmentions to specific posts), so I’m pretty sure I’m going to continue having fun 😄
Do you want to give me feedback about this article in private? Please send it to comments@zerokspot.com.
Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂