Webmentions from maistrelis.com

Submitted by Kostas Maistrelis on

If you got here from your server logs: requests with the User-Agent maistrelis.com-webmention/1.0 come from this site and are webmentions, not a scan or an attack.

What a webmention is

A webmention is a short notification that a page here links to a page of yours. It is a W3C standard and part of the IndieWeb: it lets sites learn about each other without a platform in between.

When they are sent

Only when a page here links to one of yours, and only when I publish or change that page. This site does not crawl: it follows no links and visits no page it does not mention.

What requests you will see

  1. A GET of your linked page, to find out whether and where you accept webmentions (<link rel="webmention"> or a Link header).
  2. If you do, one POST to your endpoint with two fields: source (my page) and target (your page). If you accept pingbacks instead, as WordPress does, a pingback is sent.

If your server does not answer, the request is retried a few times with growing pauses and then given up. It is not sent again unless my page changes.

The same User-Agent is used when someone sends a webmention here: my server then fetches the sender’s page to check that it really contains the link.

Requests come from 188.42.44.94, the same address as maistrelis.com.

Sending one here

If a post of yours links to a page on this site, a webmention tells me about it, and your post can then appear under that page, among the comments and mentions.

  • If your site sends webmentions on its own (many IndieWeb sites do, and WordPress with the Webmention plugin), there is nothing to do: every page here advertises its endpoint, https://jam.maistrelis.com/webmention.
  • If it does not, open «Έγραψες για αυτό στο δικό σου site;» (“Did you write about this on your own site?”) under the comment form of the page you linked to, and give the address of your post. The webmention is sent for you.

Either way, your post must contain a real link to the page with its exact address (https://, and the slash at the end), present in the HTML rather than added by JavaScript, and it appears only after I have reviewed it. If your page carries microformats (an h-entry, and an h-card with your name), the mention shows your name, your post’s title and an excerpt; otherwise your site’s name and the title of your page.

If you would rather not receive them

Write to me through the contact form and I will stop sending webmentions to your site. The same goes if anything above does not behave as described.