Being part of the IndieWeb
Webmention support comes to Perch Runway
“When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.” - IndieWeb
At Perch, owning your own content is something that we care about. We not only care that you own your own content but that you own it in a useful and future-friendly way. Websites and platforms come and go but there is value in the things we create having a much longer lifespan than that. This is what drives us to encourage you to use structured data when creating templates, and to develop an amazing templating system that allows you to do that in a straightforward way.
The Headless CMS capability added to Perch Runway is one way in which we help you then use that data for things other than displaying it via our platform. Rather than creating content in some other silo, perhaps one that belongs to a third party, you can create it in your own Runway install on your own server. Then create a format that allows something else to consume that information while you maintain ownership of it.
In the past month we have added an IndieWeb feature that helps you to own the comments and discussion around your writing. Webmention is a web standard for mentions and conversations across the web. Using Webmention means that when someone favourites or likes your writing, your website gets a notification of that and you can show how many people have favourited a particular piece. You can also display comments made in other place - such as a tweet mentioning your post on Twitter.
To find out more about getting started with Webmention in your blog, take a look at the documentation. Drew has also written a piece about implementing Webmention - and his site uses Webmention and Runway with Blog so you can see examples of displaying Likes and Comments there.
We would love to know if there are other IndieWeb features we could provide for you. I’ve created a thread in the Suggestions area of the forum, ideas and use cases are very welcome.
