One of the points of writing on the Internet is our ability to link pages together in a web. We do this in HTML with links, like this:

My friend Ton <a href="https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2018/07/wrapping-my-head-around-webmentions">writes about Webmention</a>.

When that HTML appears here on my website, it looks like this:

My friend Ton writes about Webmention.

And if you click that link, you go to Ton’s blog post.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Ton had way of knowing he was linked to!

That’s what Webmention is for. In addition to the linking, Webmention involves a notification–”hey other website, you got linked to.”

The message is simple; if I want to let Ton’s website know that I’ve linked to it, I send it:

source=https://ruk.ca/content/digging-webmention
target=https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2018/07/wrapping-my-head-around-webmentions

To know where to send it, I need to look at the source of Ton’s page–my target–for something that looks like this:

<link rel="webmention" href="https://www.zylstra.org/blog/wp-json/webmention/1.0/endpoint" />

That tells me “to let this blog post know it was linked to, send the Webmention to this URL.”

(It there’s nothing on the other end of the link that references Webmention, it’s safe to assume it doesn’t receive them, and not send a message; Webmention remains a nascent standard).

Drupal 7, which I use to manage this blog, has no built-in support for Webmentions. The Vinculum module comes tantalizingly close to supporting them, but hasn’t been updated in a long while, and it doesn’t work out of the box.

To work around this limitation, I ripped out the best parts of Vinculum–yeah open source!–and wrote my own Webmention module. Right now it only sends Webmentions, which is okay because, for the time-being, I can use the excellent non-intrusive Webmention.io to handle that part.

As Ton writes in his post, “The webmention itself is simple… What happens next is less simple.”

Here’s the less-simple part that happens once I click “Post”.

First, my module has to look at the body of my post and extract the URLs of all the pages I’ve linked to; for this post, it gets:

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2018/07/wrapping-my-head-around-webmentions
https://indieweb.org/Webmention
https://www.drupal.org/project/vinculum
https://webmention.io
https://ruk.ca/content/digging-webmention
https://www.zylstra.org/blog/wp-json/webmention/1.0/endpoint
https://aaronparecki.com/2018/06/30/11/your-first-webmention
https://indiewebify.me/

Next it has to find out which of those, if any, have the ability to receive Webmentions; it finds these endpoints:

https://www.zylstra.org/blog/wp-json/webmention/1.0/endpoint
https://webmention.io/indiewebcamp/webmention
https://webmention.io/pingback/webmention
https://webmention.io/aaronpk/webmention

And, finally, for each of those it sends the actual Webmention.

If you’re looking at adding Webmention superpowers to your writing on the web, take a look at Sending your First Webmention from Scratch, which is a very clear step-by-step guide to the system, with some helpful pointers to its fiddly bits. And, indeed, because I sent that post a Webmention, you’ll find a link back here:

The IndieWebify.Me tool is also a useful resource for debugging the same fiddly bits.

(By the way, should you send a Webmention to this post, it will be received but not–yet–displayed here; that’s my next step).

The labels on my sketchbooks show considerable variation in sketching activity over the past year: the book I finished up today was one I started in February, 5 months ago.

My pace has picked up recently, now that summer has come and I’ve more to sketch than my kitchen table.

After my wireless provider, Eastlink Wireless, decided that it would only support phones purchased from it, I went looking for a new wireless provider.

My first quandary was that Eastlink’s pricing–$40 per line per month, including 3GB of shared data–was hard to beat; indeed, none of the major providers (Bell, Telus, Rogers) nor their discount brands (Virgin, Koodo, Fido) could come close.

Then I happened upon another Telus discount brand, Public Mobile, that I’d never heard of before. It’s an interesting concept: completely self-service, no contracts, no call centre support, and 100% “bring your own device.”

As I reckoned I could do without a call centre, and bringing my own device was the point of the switch, I dug deeper and found that Public Mobile has a $40 per line per month plan which includes 4.5GB of 3G data (you can pay more for LTE data, but I never do anything bandwidth-intensive while not connected to wifi, so I didn’t need that).

Convinced this was a viable way forward, I ordered up a couple of SIM cards, one for me and one for Catherine, and they arrived in the mail four days later.

Today I finally got around to activating the service on my phone, which turned out to be relatively simple: from the Public Mobile self-service site I entered the SIM card number, the phone number I wanted to port, my name and address, and my credit card information (I set up “auto-pay,” which is a pre-paid service that bills automatically every month). The self-service site is a little bit 2005 in its usability and aesthetics, but it all appeared to work as intended.

The only confused part of the switch-over was that although the SIM card got activated immediately (I just needed to reboot my phone to do the switch), there was a delay in porting my number, meaning that I could make outbound calls but not immediately receive inbound ones. I worked around this by sticking my Eastlink SIM back in the phone until the port happened. In the end the delay was only about 30 minutes.

For those of you keeping track, Public Mobile will be my fifth wireless provider: I started out with Island Tel Mobility back in the day, then moved to Rogers, then Virgin Mobile, then Eastlink.

I report back on how things go.

A recent visit to the Internet Archive unearthed a cache of text and audio related to a summer series I presented in 1996 on CBC Prince Edward Island’s Island Morning that we called Consumed by Technology.

The episodes were part of a website hosted by erstwhile Internet service provider Island Services Network, the first toe in the waters of the Internet by CBC on the Island. This meant that, by virtue of having constructed the CBC’s site in the first place, I had uncommon freedom to post and document the Consumed by Technology series in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to previously or later: I linked to each episode’s RealAudio file, provided a list of links (what we’ve come to call, in the podcasting world, “show notes”), and the transcript of the episode (the text I provided to the hosts).

Like A User’s Guide to the Future that I presented the summer before on Island Morning, Consumed by Technology provides a small window into the beginnings of the digital age on Prince Edward Island; what’s remarkable to me is that the issues I chose to highlight back then, more than 20 years ago, are still the issues I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about today.

Like the previous summer’s series, Consumed by Technology was produced by Ann Thurlow for the CBC.

Here are the seven episodes, in order of broadcast:

1. Four inches of metal strapping for 37 cents
2. Sale on words… 50 cents a pound
3. The Death of Time
4. What have they got on me?
5. Thirty year olds who buy diapers and tractors twice-weekly
6. Bugs, glitches and other disasters
7. Of bombs and porn and the ‘net

The Other Club was founded in London in 1911 by Winston Churchill and F.E. Smith, reportedly after Churchill and Smith were passed over for membership in The Club.

Twelve rules were drafted for the renegade club, the most interesting of which is Rule № 10:

The names of the Executive Committee shall be wrapped in impenetrable mystery.

I’ve memorialized the rule in this letterpress print which, should you be so-inclined, you can buy a copy of from my Etsy shop.

I received an invitation to attend a “stakeholders tour” of the Province House restoration this afternoon; I hold no office that entitles me to such an invitation, other than that of being a significantly-interested neighbour, so I count myself lucky.

There were two groups through the site today, one at 1:00 p.m. and the second at 3:00 p.m., and a lunch appointment required I attend the second; this turned out to be a fortuitous happenstance, as a quintet of Island-history-steeped–Linda Berko, Jim Macnutt, Ed Macdonald, Reg Porter and David Keenlyside–were in attendance. It was like visiting a record store with the Beatles. Suffice to say, many, many, many questions were asked and answered, and when the tour guides didn’t have an answer at hand, one of the quintet was generally able to jump in.

I took a lot of photos–my favourite is the one below, of the basement–but none of the capture the essence of being inside the place accurately. I have spent a lot of time in Province House over the last 25 years: in the public gallery, in meetings, and doing computer support. I know the building well. And to encounter it in such an undressed state was bracing; it was truly like encountering a close relative’s skeletal remains.

Fortunately, everything we learned points to a careful, informed restoration process underway, led by capable people. I hold out hope that when Prince Edward Island turns 150 in 2023 we will be able to celebrate it with a newly-dressed Province House at the heart.

My friend Simon, engaging in some admirable proactive librarianship, passed along a clipping from the July 23, 1993 edition of The Guardian with a story headlined “Crafts Council going high tech,” concerning the post I’d started 5 months previous to harvest data about crafts supply sources for Island crafts producers.

I’m pictured in my tiny cubicle in the back of the Crafts Council’s shop on 156 Richmond Street, sitting in front of the IBM PS/2 that I used to do my work.

That computer was running Windows 3.1 at the time; within a year I’d installed Slackware Linux, and it became the server that powered Prince Edward Island’s first website. As far as I know, this is the only photo ever taken of that machine.

I challenge you to tear yourself away from this captivating holding forth by Stephen Fry at Oxford once you start watching it.

Among the things you will learn is the backstory to Oscar Wilde’s visit to Charlottetown.

Fry speaks for 45 minutes without stopping for air. And those are just his introductory remarks before being interviewed.

In the 2018 Prince Edward Island white pages—yes, the white pages still exist—you won’t find a listing for our house, or Catherine’s studio, or my office: we long ago made our numbers virtual ones that redirect to our mobile phones.

But you will find a listing for Reinvented Labs.

With a number that hasn’t worked for years.

I have no idea why.