/blog

A year to the day since the beginning of Lockdown 1. A year to the day of working from home, except for three days in December I would rather forget. It's not the kind of anniversary we wanted and we're not out of the woods yet.

If anything the past year has taught me that I like working from home, that given the choice I would never go back to the office – at least not that office.

Political shenanigans continue over the distribution of vaccines with threats of export blocks when governments should be working together to ensure there is equal distribution. It doesn't matter where they're manufactured but, sadly, money trumps all and deals have been made.

After yesterday's eureka moment regarding comment replies I think I'm there and am now able to have webmentions sent when a comment is replied to.

I created a new reply template – a pseudo-page for comments, just like the WordPress plugin, that uses a similar principle to linking directly to comments. When a reply is submitted the source URL is built from the post number and comment ID giving a false address in the format /reply.php?date=2021-03-21&c=2:333 (21st March, second post, comment ID 333).

The reply template takes the details from the URL and builds the comment page so that a remote endpoint can extract the required details. If the link is followed it auto-redirects to the actual comment in situ and I have tweaked the comment linking function to work for links in both 'post:comment number' and 'post:comment ID' formats.

I've done some testing and, fingers crossed, it seems to work okay – it had better as it is live. Replies locally are okay and I have also replied to a couple of webmentions from micro.blog and they have shown up correctly.

I may, however, have broken something on my webmention endpoint as internal mentions are not getting written to the database as comments.

Update: external mentions seem fine so not sure what the problem is.

Update 2: and now it's working again with no changes. 🤷‍♂️

I'd forgotten that I had added a note of how many comments a post had when you hovered over the comment icon:

With comment threads I had to update this as it was only registering top-level comments. A quick nested query to pull in nested replies and we're back in action. I've also updated the text to be a little more obvious.