I know this only an ego trip, but I'd like to get back to having comments enabled on my website. That part is actually quite easy. There is a good Comments plugin for Grav that I have tested locally and it does a nice job. More than comments, though, I want IndieWeb comments. That is, I want people to be able to comment on, link to, like or otherwise engage with my content on their own site¹ and have that show up here, on my site. In other words, I want it all.

The key to all this is a technology called webmentions. Webmentions are somewhat fundamental to the way the IndieWeb deals with conversations, because they allow all the participants to own their contributions. In essence, if you react to something I've published, your site sends a message to my site. What I choose to do with that is completely up to me.

Continuing my efforts to bring old stuff into this new bottle, I came across a post from 3 January 2006.

my favourite list of 2005: The Year in Media Errors and Corrections. The parent site looks worth bookmarking for future entertainment.

Alas, Wayback Machine knows it not. At least the l...

It being too hot to do anything outside, I got back into the swing of bringing old blog posts in here, from February 2005. One in particular seems worth bringing to life. Take back the net is about a crazed scheme to game search engines by encouraging bloggers¹ to add the words Online Poker to their blogroll but -- and here's the crazy part -- to link to the Wikipedia entry for Online Poker.² Back then, Ozh wrote:

This sounds crazy, I know, but after three days of testing myself round and round in circles, I am beginning to think that there is some fundamental way in which the Grav webmention plugin behaves very differently in a local MAMP development environment versus the live, production environment.

I need to go back to first principles, I think. If only I could work out what those are.

It was fun listening to Melvyn Bragg trying to get to grips with the ineffable mysteries of bird migration. The facts don't seem to have changed much since I taught the subject, decades ago,¹ although there are now many more of them. And almost all of those facts are clearly enough to make even Lord Bragg's mind boggle, as we heard throughout the show. But I kept waiting for one of the guests to make one key point.