This site is now webmention-aware

This site now supports webmention, so you can notify me easily if you respond to one of my posts on your own website or blog.

What’s a webmention?

‘Webmention’ is a standardized way for owners of websites or blogs to tell one another that a link has been posted from one article to another. You’d typically send a webmention because you’ve posted something in response to another person’s page or blog entry, and you want that person to know you have.

If you’re publishing a response to another person’ post, you’d typically start by writing something like:

“This post is in response to Fred Bloggs’ post on Mastodon (or wherever) on December 25 2025 about…

You’d typically include the full URL of the post you’re responding to, so your own readers can see it. After all, there’s no point writing a response to something nobody else can find.

Webmentions are widely used by the operators of personal, static websites (like this one), and decentralized social media platforms like Mastodon. They aren’t supported by corporate social platforms like X/Twitter. That’s because these platforms centralize all their users’ content under the service providers’ control. Running your own website or blog allows you to maintain ownership of your content, rather than surrendering it to a tech giant which doesn’t have your interests at heart.

What makes social media engaging (or so I’m told) is the immediacy of the feedback. You can respond straight away to something another person posts, and that person will see your response – and perhaps respond in turn – quickly. Webmention is a scheme that tries to implement that same kind of feedback, but outside the corporate web.

How to notify me manually

You’ll see, at the end of most of my posts (other than indexes and menus), a form you can use to send me a webmention. To use the form, you’ll need to paste in the URL of the page that contains your response to my page. Please note that the page you’re notifying me about must actually contain a link to my page – this isn’t the right way just to send me a message. The webmention broker checks that the link exists on your page, and you’ll get an error message if there isn’t one.

How to notify me automatically

In practice, some of the decentralized social platforms have webmention support built-in: when you create a response to a post on a compatible platform, the service will send the webmention automatically. The form at the bottom of my pages is for folks who aren’t using platforms of this kind, just regular websites. Even then, some website builders – like WordPress – have plug-ins that send webmentions, so you still might not need to do it manually.

Why am I doing this?

Back in the day, I hosted my stuff on centralized, commercial blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress. These platforms were easy to use, and readers could post whatever responses they wanted, and they’d appear on my blog straight away.

That approach was fine in the days when everybody played nicely together but, as the Internet got more and more hostile, it became a nuisance. Either I let people post whatever they wanted – and ‘people’ often turned out to be ad-bots – or I moderated the responses. But wading through a hundred pages of ad-spam, just to find the one or two genuine posts, was a nuisance.

Moreover, I wanted to own and control my content. If you use a corporate blogging host, there’s a risk that a failure could lose your content, and it’s hard to control what the service operator does with it. The Blogger platform is owned by Google, after all, so we can’t expect a high level of regard for personal privacy. Other commercial platforms might be no better; after all, they have to be funded somehow. So, with some reluctance, I moved back to an ordinary, static website, of the kind I’ve been maintaining since 1994.

Still, people do respond to my ramblings. They post that they agree with me, or that they disagree, or that I’m an outright idiot who shouldn’t be allowed a keyboard. All well and good, but I can’t respond to them – I can’t even fix the mistakes that readers are sometimes kind enough to notice – if I don’t know about these responses.

Sometimes people are sufficiently moved – incensed, in some cases – that they e-mail me directly. If they allow me, I’ll add their comments to the page they took issue with. I don’t edit these comments: I just add them to the page, just as if they’d posted a comment on a WordPress site. Still, it would be a lot easier for me if I could just add a link to my page, pointing to the comments of whomever disagreed with me (or agreed, on rare occasions).

That’s what the webmention system is intended to do: it collects links to comments that refer to my pages – whether in agreement or disagreement – and I can click a button to add them to the appropriate pages.

This is all very experimental right now: I’ve only had my site set up to handle webmentions for a short time, and I don’t know whether it will prove useful. If it doesn’t, no matter – I’ll just take the links out.

Of course, because I’m new to webmention, it might still be quicker for you to contact me by email, and I’m happy for people to do that.