As I was scrolling along yesterday, a post about the lovely Professional Elite typeface popped up in my feed on Reddit. It linked back to Tom Fasano’s website, so I read the original there. I noticed a syndication icon at the bottom and stopped dead in my tracks! Had I run into a fully featured IndieWeb website in the wild?!?

I peeked at the code and saw a Webmention endpoint hiding in there and nearly fell over. Webmention is a web standard that allows any website to talk directly to any other website as if they were social media peers on the same platform. 

I immediately fired up my new-to-me 1959 Olympia SM3 which also has a Professional Elite No. 41 typeface to dash off a note to Tom and his typewriter. I posted it to my website as a typecast reply. But most importantly, my website sent a webmention (think @mention/notification) to Tom that I had replied to his post. Voila! My reply was in his comments section just moments later, as if by magic.  I’ve only done this a few times as there aren’t many typewriter collector/typecasting bloggers out there who’ve added the technology to their sites yet, but this certainly opens up a new space for typewriter social networking by way of the web rather than just via post.

The careful observer will also notice that because Tom syndicated his original post to Reddit and included a syndication link, he’s getting replies from Reddit back into his website via Webmention using a service called Brid.gy. So if you want to type up a reply to his post, or even this one, and post it to the Reddit thread you can participate that way (if your website doesn’t have the capability yet.)

Who else in the typosphere has a website that supports webmention? Let’s start a chat.

If you’d like to go deeper into the subject of Webmention, try this article in A List Apart: “Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet“.