WebMention is a protocol for letting other pages know that you mentioned them. For example, in the next paragraph, I mention a blog post by James (by linking to it). While this might seem trivial, WebMention allows you to do so much more than just ping other bloggers.

This post is a friendly nod to 100 things you can do on your personal website by James.

For more information about WebMention, you might want to read Rob Knight’s “What Even is a Webmention?”.

100* things you can do with WebMention on your blog

This list is in no particular order other than roughly the order in which I thought of the ideas and wrote them down.

1. Reply to WebMention-supported content with a blog post.
2. Enable others to reply via blog posts, web pages, and any other content that allows links.
3. Apply as a standards-compliant modern alternative to pingbacks.
4. Use webmention.io to receive WebMentions
5. Tell your social media followers about WebMention and invite them to come and give it a try.
6. Start a friendly debate.
7. Start an unfriendly debate. (maybe don’t do this one)
8. Create open topics anyone can ping for topic-specific discovery like on Open Mentions.
9. Use an OpenMentions topic in each post so your post appears on the front page.
10. Reply to Open Mentions’ Question of the Week.
11. Ask an open-ended question others can WebMention reply to.
12. Politely disagree with someone
13. Maintain a page where all non-specific mentions of your entire site can be displayed.
14. Send a like.
15. Receive a like.
16. Use other people’s posts as a jumping-off point for your own posts.
17. RSVP to WebMention-enabled events. See here, here, and here for more.
18. Post public events that people can RSVP to.
19. Make a facepile (an option offered by the WordPress WebMention plugin)
20. Find WordPress.com (hosted) blogs to reply to (at least those that activated WebMention)
21. Reply to replies on the replying brill blog.
22. Run a writing or blogging competition that people enter by linking to and pinging (mentioning) the competition page.
23. Join in with the Wrong Answers Only community.
24. Create a pair of endpoints (pages/posts/whatever) for a side-by-side debate on a topic
25. Use brid.gy to extend WebMention to your social media.
26. Use fed.brid.gy to further extend things to include Bluesky (and other social media of the Fediverse)
    • Here’s the breakdown of the difference for bridgy and bridgy fed
27. Format your WebMentions to look like a (mobile chat) conversation (like this).
28. Replace your comments entirely with WebMentions (like eRambler)
29. Create several endpoints (posts/pages/whatever) as a poll where votes are WebMentions, likes, toots, boosts, and anything else that WebMention can process.
30. Test your endpoint(s) with webmention.rocks.
31. Figure out what Vouch is and use it to harden your site against spam via WebMention.
    • I should point out I have never had WebMention spam.
    • But there are methods for dealing with said spam.
32. Use all sorts of microformats so WebMention endpoints can understand the mention better.
33. Add a plugin that handles microformats for you.
34. The same but for WebFinger.
35. Post a hot take and challenge others to prove you wrong.
36. Write a blog post about WebMention so your fans and readers might think about using it too
37. Write a post about your use of WebMention so people can find it by search
38. Join in the Author Buzz chat.
39. Put up a widget or sidebar bit telling people they can use WebMention on your page
40. Add a “ping this page” form so non-WebMention users can still mention it (the WordPress plugin does this for you).
41. Write reviews of interesting posts and pages that support WebMention.
42. Play hangman and take the guesses via WebMention – first come, first served.
43. Create fan pages and allow people to add themselves to the list via a WebMention comment.
44. Subscribe to RSS feeds (where available) of comments on highly active pages. For example, on a WordPress blog to follow the lastest WebMention powered conversation/news.
45. Create a guestbook for other WebMention users to “sign” to say hello or whatever.
46. Allow same domain pings so your follow-up posts also appear as comments on the older posts.
47. Create a blog just for WebMention replying to stuff
48. Maintain a list of WebMention-enabled blogs and sites
49. Create a classifieds system where the adverts are WebMentions (update to delete)
50. Publish your photos from events and cons – ask people to WebMention images that feature them so you can make new friends.
51. Implement a like/star/heart system so social media likes, stars, hearts, or whatever appear on the page too.
52. Roll your own implementation (if that’s something you know how to do).
53. Post your code and invite feedback and/or review.
54. Invent a new WebMention extension such as say, Agree/Disagree, and see if you can get anyone to use it.
55. Create a series of WebMention-enabled pages to use as a replacement form of inline category/tag system and archive.
56. Use your mentions to show a little love to bloggers who don’t get much traffic.
57. Start a game of D&D with a new post for each encounter. Have the players write their reactions and dice results in the form of a WebMention.
58. Use WordPress and pair with the Friends and ActivityPub plugins to create a single-user Social Media Node (like mine).
59. Create a second blog and argue with yourself.
60. Write a post and be very deliberately wrong about something. Close the comments to force people to use WebMention to correct you.
61. Start a story and let other people continue the tale via WebMentions.
62. Publish a /now page and update it via WebMentions
63. Create project page(s) and post updates and progress reports via WebMentions from your blog
64. Host or start a blog carnival for WebMention blogs – all the members will see when the update is published.
65. Set up your site to be a bit like a forum of sorts where replies are WebMentions.
66. Propose topics for people (including you) to blog about
67. Document your favourite framework and allow contributions (code, gotchas, etc) by WebMention.
68. Write a script that pulls RSS feeds from your favourite WebMention blogs. Have the script make a summary page of all of the day’s posts. Now you have the freshest topics to reply to.
69. Create a code-golf site and have submissions via WebMention.
70. Write a script to go through your WebMentions and create a top 10 list of the most frequently mentioning domains.
71. Write a script to go through your posts and see which domains you mentioned most often for another top 10.
72. Write a weekly post detailing your favourite posts from WebMention-enabled sites for that week.
73. Publish a post asking for help with a problem or task you are stuck on. This may work well for programming-related problems as many WebMention users are code people who may be willing to post tutorials answering your question.
74. Start a list and invite others to finish it. Talking of which…
75. Mention this list adding more ideas to make up the shortfall.

Erm, yeah. *This is not 100 things (except if you use aggressive rounding). In the spirit of the 74 and 75, over to you. What other uses of WebMention can you think of?

Filed (unsurprisingly) on the OpenMentions topic of WebMention.

• brid.gy