Several other blogs I follow have webmentions, so I looked into what they were. I thought they were pretty cool. I liked the idea of replies and mentions from other sites showing up right under my own posts. I wondered if my own blog could do the same.
Then I read this post from Read Bean Ice Cream, which walked through everything it actually takes to set one up. Their site is static, with no server running behind it, so nothing can automatically verify it or send a mention on its own. That is why the list was so long: one account just to prove it was really me, another to give mentions a place to land, another to catch mentions on social media, plus new code to show it's all working. The post is even titled "I Am Too Lazy for Webmentions," so it already sounded like a lot before I even got into the details. Reading that list, I thought, oh no, I do not want to deal with all of that too.
Turns out I never had to go through any of it. Micro.blog already has webmentions built in. Nothing for me to add, no accounts to create, no endpoint to set up. I got lucky landing on a platform that already does the hard part.
Weeks later, on August 12, Kelly Adams wrote about my post about nudify apps and bullying and tagged me on Discord to let me know directly. Nothing showed up on the post itself, so that is when I got the idea to build something myself: a custom mention card I could add by hand.
That is where the custom mention card comes in. I built an HTML and CSS setup for it in my own app, so when I find a mention, I can insert the card right into the post and publish it again by hand.
The funny thing is, I've been writing drafts and making revisions for over a month now, learning more about them along the way. I made some huge changes and some small changes. Here is one example. While I was looking for something unrelated in my account settings on Micro.blog, I accidentally found a Webmentions section I didn't know existed. Two mentions were already there, both from Kelly's post, logged a few days before he ever messaged me on Discord. Micro.blog had already received them. I just had not gone looking yet.
I feel lucky I found that Webmentions section when I did. If I had not, I would have published this whole post thinking my blog never received a single mention, which was not true at all.
Right there on that page, above the two mentions themselves, Micro.blog explains it: webmentions are incoming links from other sites, and they only get included as replies if they use what it calls proper markup. So receiving and displaying turned out to be two different things. My blog was catching mentions I did not even know to look for.
If you are on Micro.blog too, it is worth checking your own account settings for a Webmentions section. You might already have some sitting there. Now I know where to look to see if I receive new mentions. How cool is that?
Turns out I was not missing mentions. I was just not looking in the right place.