I love the idea of everything we do contributing to the legend of our life. Not the ego-building external kind, but the internal story, how we see ourselves and what we have achieved.
To assess your actions as adding to this legend or not seems a pretty good indicator of whether you should be doing them.
Seth wrote about the stories of products and services, the amount you pay for one over another is the story - it's the value we attach to it.
As individuals we are telling our own stories, building our own legends. They are what makes us special, what makes us unique, our individual worth over someone else. They occur sometimes in private, others in public, and often these domains cross.
I think that's what blogs are - or should be - a public manifestation of our stories. We may not wish to share it all, publish every chapter, but we need to be happy it represents "us" and adds to our legend.
We can become distracted, post things for impact, attention, notoriety, but these do not add to our legend - they are not parts of our true story.
We need to discover that and this in turn will inform our writing.
# Apologies if you've had multiple test posts in the RSS feed. I've been trying to get "nomentions" working as a filter rather than by editing the webmention plugin but I'm not quite there yet.
As suggested by David Shanske I'm trying to filter the target URLs using my original code but as a callback to the webmention_links hook.
As mentioned yesterday I was looking to get "nomentions" working without having to edit the webmention plugin itself.
David pointed out that the plugin sets up a filter which enables you to process the target URLs before mentions are sent so I needed to hook into this:
$targets = apply_filters( 'webmention_links', $links, $post_id );
By default nothing happens with this line as no filters are defined leaving you free to add whatever you need. So I moved my code from the webmention plugin to a callback function in a new plugin which hooks in using add_filter() and checks each link in the post for the nomention class, excluding any it finds.
The code is as follows:
function nomention_links( $links, $post_id ) {
$mentions = '';
foreach ($results[0] as $link) {
if (!strpos($link, 'class="nomention')) {
$mentions .= $link;
}
}
$links = wp_extract_urls($mentions);
return $links;
}
add_filter( 'webmention_links', 'nomention_links', 10, 2 );
As my posts are written in Markdown (and WordPress uses MultiMarkdown thanks to JetPack) I can easily add the nomention class to any link like this:
link text here
My original use case was to be able to link to a conversation on micro.blog without the post automatically being treated as a reply but there could be other occasions when you don't want to send a mention for whatever reason.
As always, the plugin is listed on GitHub should you have a need and want to try it.
Note: the plugin only handles <a> tags, if you wanted to extend this to other types of link such as <img> tags please see the note in the readme.
@colinwalker but of course.