Comments and Webmentions

While this blog doesn’t and likely never will support comments, I’ve recently implemented some support for incoming webmentions, which may appear below a post, much exactly like the comments of yore.

DrewMcLellan does an excellent job explaining what webmentions are, and Wikipedia summarizes the protocol as follows:

Similar to pingback, Webmention is one of four types of linkbacks, but was designed to be simpler than the XML-RPC protocol that pingback relies upon, by instead only using HTTP and x-www-urlencoded content.

My implementation can be found on GitHub, and even though this very site is set up somewhat unusually, I’ve kept the plugin fairly generic: it should work on just about any WordPress site.