My Janky Webmention Setup
While I’ve no interest in having comments here, I do like knowing if someone’s blogged something I wrote, so I sat down once again to look into putting webmentions back in place on the blog.
It’s never been my intention to display them, but I still wanted to be able to receive and send them. Where I got stuck was that it wasn’t clear to me at all how—or even if—the Webmention plugin interacted with the native settings for trackbacks and pingbacks.
I’ve no interest in belaboring this meta/process post. Suffice it to say that in order to accept webmentions but not accept trackbacks or pingback, which rely on XML-RPC and that’s something I disable, you have to have those turned off in site settings but then have “Allow pingbacks & trackbacks” turned on at the individual post level.
It took an enormous amount of frustration and lack of clarity to figure this out.
My next hurdle was that I did not want to have to login to WordPress in order to see any mentions. If I were using the hosted Webmention.io service there’d be an Atom feed which I could view in my RSS reader.
Since webmentions are saved as comments, it should be as simple as subscribing to my comments RSS feed.
Except that I have comments functionality completely disabled, since there’s no reason even to expose the functionality if I’m not using it. So, it seemed as if I were stuck. As it turns out, however, the JSON Feed plugin completely ignores if WordPress has comments turned off or comments disabled, which means I can use its comments feed in my RSS reader.
(Alas, if and when JSON Feed fixes this bug, I’ll no longer be able to subscribe to my mentions this way.)
In theory, then, webmention should be up and running here, although I’m not entirely sure if they are working for anything and everything beyond just posts. I’m not especially concerned either way, because what I’m interested in is people writing about my writing, not simply people linking to my blog.
This is, as I say, janky as all get-out, and for all I know won’t even be worth the aggravation. Still, it is what it is, and if you blog anything I’ve blogged and make use of webmention, I now should be picking it up.