I wanted a way to add comments to the site, if only there was a way to bring comments in from outside and make them a part of the conversation here. A part of the whole point of POSSE is the SE bit (Syndicate Elsewhere/Everywhere). Currently I'm managing that with EchoFeed by Robb Knight. It's great, echo picks up an RSS/Atom feed, finds a new post then toots to my Mastodon feed. What I want is a way for people to go from the post to Mastodon, reply to that toot, and have their reply appear here on the site.

The thing of it is that the IndieWeb is full of cleaver people, who have thought about this and made it work already.

So after reading posts from:-

• Juha-Matti Santala
• Cassidy James Blaede
• Veronica Berglyd Olsen
• Jan Wildeboer
• Yidhra Farm
• Carl Schwan
• Daniel Pecos Martínez

I felt I understood what I needed to do, and better than that, the post by Juhis had so much code in it that it made a fantastic starting point for my own implementation. The main change I wanted to do though was that I wanted to make it a standalone web component. I'm using Kelp by Chris Ferdinandi and I had seen a video from Chris about how he was integrating web components into Kelp.

What you have to remember is that I've never even looked at Web Components before. But with Chris's video and a bit of DuckDuckGo-ing, I pulled together a working component and it looked good.

But this is where my over thinking head kicks in. If I publish my site it all or nothing. For echo to do it's job it needs to pick up the feed with the new post and I really should have the post on the site for the eager beavers. BUT what if someone pulls the RSS/Atom feeds before I have a chance to:-

• Grab the Mastodon toot ID
• Add it to my new post
• Rebuild the site
• Publish the new version of the feeds. Would feed readers update the content properly? or are they just going to have the version that's missing the reply link?

My solution to this 1 in a 1000 problem? If the post has a blank MastodonID don't include it to the main feeds, create a separate Syndication Feed that is intended only for services like Echo to pick up.

That way I can

• Publish the site
• Echo picks up it's feed & makes the toot
• I can go to Mastodon and get the ID
• Add it to the FrontMatter of the post
• Republish

All safe in the knowledge that anyone who refreshes their feeds while I'm faffing isn't going to miss the GLORY that is a link to a page that they can totally fail to leave me a comment 😜

If anyone wants to see the awfulness that is my first Web Component or they think they could use it on their own site Comment bellow :-)

Everyone has to start somewhere, Stay Lucky. 👶