In the transition to a new personal blog, I initially wanted to fully incorporate webmentions. I even designed and coded a mostly custom setup that included a beautifully formatted facepile, replies list, and on and on.

There were headaches to be sure, but it went well…ish. There were still obstacles to overcome concerning emojis, images, threaded replies, replies not formatted perfectly, etc. The more I went down the rabbit hole, the more I realized that the time required to remedy those issues wouldn’t come near the benefits from doing it.

In researching, I stumbled across Robb Knight’s Webmention Redux post where he discusses further issues with the setup. In the end, he scrapped displaying webmentions in favor of a Mastodon widget of sorts that displays the post, likes counter, boosts counter, and reply counter. I immediately liked that idea and decided to implement it on this site.

Using David Darnes mastodon-post web component as a starting point, I integrated a similar setup here.

Mastodon Post

Here’s how it currently works:

  1. I publish a new post
  2. I share it on Mastodon via Echofeed
  3. I add it to the YAML of the new post
  4. I update the post

Due to the limits of time travel, there will always be a delay between the initial publishing of the post and the eventual display of the Mastodon element on the site. I’m sure there’s a way to automate Steps 3 and 4, perhaps with Echofeed’s Web Requests, but that’s a project for another day.