Update on Apfelhammer.de - Bashblog with webmention and isso comments

October 12, 2025 — Jan Montag

So, this post is an update to my "weblog engine" Bashblog. This is a Shellscript wich renders my weblog in static html files, like all the other static website generators like Jekyll or Pelikan or you name it do. But there is a difference: for bb.sh you only need the standard linux tools like awk, sed etc. pp., and this works with a nice css file out of the box really good.

My Weblog apfelhammer.de with Webmention and ISSO comments

What are the steps for Webmentions?

To make a website fully Webmention-ready, you need to take a few essential steps that connect your content to the broader social web. First, each post on your site should use microformats, the structured HTML classes that allow other tools to recognize what’s what. Typically, you mark your articles with the h-entry class, your name or author link with h-card, the title with p-name, and the post content with e-content. These help other sites and Webmention services understand your page’s structure and what to respond to.

<link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/YOURDOMAIN/webmention" />
<link rel="pingback" href="https://webmention.io/YOURDOMAIN/xmlrpc" />

This tells other websites where to send notifications when they link to you. Once that’s in place, you can send and receive Webmentions. Sending them usually happens automatically through your CMS or a script that pings linked URLs whenever you publish a new post. Receiving them means collecting and displaying comments, likes, or reposts that come from other Webmention-enabled sites. If you’re using webmention.io, you can fetch those mentions through its API and render them on your own site—often grouped visually beneath your posts as “mentions” or “replies.” Finally, it’s a good idea to test your setup with tools like IndieWebify.me or the Webmention Rocks! test suite. These check if your microformats are correct and your endpoint works as expected. Once you pass those tests, your website isn’t just a publication—it’s a participant in the distributed conversation of the web.

On the other hand, I impletemnted ISSO Commenting System.

ISSO is a commenting server similiar to Disqus, but you host it by yourself and the comments stay at your website in a sqlite databse and therefore they are not big data. They cannot be used for Ads. They belong to the User. To the Weblog. To the content. Nothing more. Nothing less. So when comments, than something like ISSO. Read more here.

But… Why?

Webmentions are the quiet revolution the web has been waiting for—a return to the open, interconnected spirit that once defined the internet. Instead of letting conversations rot inside corporate silos like Facebook or X, Webmentions let sites talk to each other directly, across domains, in the open. The IndieWeb movement reminds us that we don’t need permission from billionaires or algorithms to communicate; we can own our words, our data, and our connections. In a time when politics, propaganda, and platforms like Trump’s Truth Social thrive on isolation and outrage, the open web is a radical act of democracy. Each personal website, each federated conversation, is a vote against manipulation and monopolization. Webmentions rebuild the social web as it should have been—human-scaled, respectful, and decentralized. They are not nostalgic, but revolutionary: an infrastructure for digital citizenship. In the noise of the platforms, Webmentions are a clear, honest voice saying: we can build the web we want ourselves.

Ressources

Tags: webmention, webmentions, isso-comments, isso, commenting, bashblog, indieweb

This Is Apfelhammer!