I first started blogging way back in the early years of the century1 and the platform I used would let a blogger know if you blogged about their post in turn. The mechanism was called a Pingback and was extremely valuable.
- It let you know someone had read what you’d written
- It let you know what you’d written had perturbed them in some way
- It let you know they had taken the time to respond
Most importantly for me, it helped me to find and develop a community of like-minded people.
I thought they system had disappeared. It wasn’t until I read this Curtis McHale post in RSS and followed one of the links through to a web page that I saw the option to enter the URL of any responding post I made. The process is a little more manual, but the intention is the same.
It’s called a webmention and is an expansion on the original pingback solution. Unfortunately this site is statically-generated so to implement this system I need go down a path I’m not yet willing to travel (lots of extra scripting and databases I expect). Curtis creates his site using Wordpress and a plugin so it’s easier for him that it will be for me.
Footnotes
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The importance of experience, 17 February 2002. ↩