I have a ‘recent posts’ and ‘recent comments’ section in the sidebar. This seemed to create problems with the processing of webmentions, specifically with Aaron Parecki’s Xray library for grabbing structured info from any URL. It would find an apparently improperly micro-formatted link in the sidebar and take that as the URL of the posting referred to. This would create faulty likes on other people’s sites, which then would send webmentions to the wrong postings.
As recent posts and recent comments are only a navigational aid when you’re looking at things like the front page, search results and archive pages, I looked into if I can show them on those pages only. Because if those sections aren’t present on the pages of individual postings, they cannot cause problems when parsed for structure. This being a WordPress site, of course there’s a plugin for it, Widget Context. I installed it, removed the offending widgets from individual pages, and it looks like the problem has been solved.
A summary overview of changes I made to this site, to make it more fully a indieweb hub / my core online presence. The set-up of my WordPress installation also has been described.
Theme related tweaks
Created child theme of Sempress, to be able to change appearance and functions
Renamed comments to reactions (as they contain likes, reposts, mentions etc.)
in the entry-footer template and the comments template
Removed h-card microformats, and put in a generic link to my about page for the author in the Sempress function sempress_posted_on. Without a link to the author mentions show up as anonymous elsewhere.
Removed the sharing buttons I used (although they were GDPR compliant using the Sharriff plugin, but they got in the way a lot I felt.
Added a few menu options for various aspects of my postings (books, check-ins, languages)
Introduced several categories to deal with different content streams: Dutch, German for non-English postings, Day to Day for things not on the home page, Plazes for check-ins, Books for ehh books, RSS-Only for unlisted postings, and Micromessage for tweets I send from the blog. This allows me to vary how I display these different types of things (or not)
Displaying last edited and created dates to (wiki)pages
Functionality related tweaks
Started creating pages as a wiki-like knowledgebase, using page categories to create the wiki structure
To show excerpts from webmentions I changed the template for a webmention in the Semantinc backlinks plugin, class-linkbacks-handler.php
Added a plugin to display blogposts on the same date in previous years.
Added plugin Widget Context to remove recent posts and comments from individual posting’s pages, as they cause trouble with parsing them for webmentions.
Using categories as differentiator I added language mark-up to individual postings, category archives. Also added automatic translation links to non-English postings in the RSS feed (not on the site). On the front page non-English postings have language mark-up around the posting.
Added a blogroll that is an OPML file with a stylesheet, so it can be equally read by humans and machines.
Trying to add an extra RSS feed for comments that excludes webmentions and ping/trackbacks
Other tweaks
Set up 2 additional WordPress instances for testing purposes (Proto and Meso)