One of the challenges I have been looking at has actually come because of others. Now, if you’ve been looking at my website, you might notice that, thanks to the efforts of myself, Matthias Pfefferle, and Ryan Barrett that there have been major improvements to the presentation of different types of responses on my site. I have a screenshot of the replies on a recent post.
Facepiles, the row of faces representing people who ‘liked’ or what have you, was actually the first project I tackled when I joined the Indieweb community back in 2014. I’ve learned a lot since then.
Either way, the current work not only builds on what I’ve learned, but the contributions by Ryan, who really wanted this feature available, really jumpstarted things. Now, all of these people below don’t know they commented on my site…as they commented elsewhere and I pulled it back to my site via webmention.
So, it brings me to a new problem I want to solve. Homepage mentions. What is that? So, in June, we implemented the ability to direct webmentions(which I’ve talked about before) that reference your homepage as opposed to a specific article to a designated page.
WordPress doesn’t allow the attachment of responses directly to the homepage, and david.shanske.com represents me, having a direct relationship to me on Twitter, Facebook, etc. So, any mention of my website or my username on one of those sites generates a mention that is sent to my site.
This is a problem in display. In recent weeks, I’ve had the following scenarios my website doesn’t yet deal with in a satisfactory way
- Someone referencing my website as me, effectively tagging me in their post as having been somewhere. Example: With David(david.shanske.com)
- Someone referencing my website as me in mentioning something I did. Example: David(david.shanske.com) kindly helped me.
Neither of this usages by others are displayed properly website, which is why they are not showing at all. I’m not sure how or where to display them.
Should someone mentioning me in this manner give me the option of generating a post, ala Facebook’s service of letting others post on your timeline, even if I moderate it somehow?
At the least, it should generate a message appropriate to the situation. And if it does, where should it go? Should I display recent mentions on the sidebar of my homepage? On a dedicated page?
The Indieweb declares a person tag as a tag on a post that refers to a specific person by URL and is done as a explicit action. Many of these mentions are explicit, but some are less so.
My goal is by mid January to figure out how I’m going to display these, one way or another, and write some code to do this. Perhaps as my project for Indiewebcamp Baltimore, coming up in late January.
