Micro.blog sends Webmentions to external blogs when you “reply” to a post inside Micro.blog. It marks up your reply with Microformats, discovers the Webmention endpoint for the post you’re replying to, and sends the Webmention. This allows your Micro.blog replies to be included as comments on blogs hosted by other platforms, like WordPress.
An RSVP is a special type of reply used to indicate whether you’re attending an event. By posting RSVPs to your own blog, you can attach them to existing posts or just have your own copy of the data. As more bloggers use RSVPs, we could eventually have a more distributed, IndieWeb-friendly system instead of relying on Facebook or Evite.
How to create an RSVP on Micro.blog? We don’t currently have an RSVP button in Micro.blog, because Webmention-enabled events are still rare enough that it would take up a lot of the Micro.blog UI, potentially cluttering the interface.
You’ll need a little bit of HTML to create an RSVP. First, add a link to where you want to send the Webmention. Instead of using Markdown for the link, use HTML and add the Microformats class="u-in-reply-to" to mark the link as a reply to another URL:
Looking forward to this <a href="..." class="u-in-reply-to">Webmentions pop-up session</a> next month.
Then, to make this an RSVP, add a data tag somewhere in the post with “yes”, “maybe”, or “no”:
<data class="p-rsvp" value="yes" />
I like to use data because it’s invisible when displayed in a web browser, but it could be a span or other HTML tag. You can see a full example of this if you view the HTML source of my post here, RSVP-ing to an IndieWeb online event.
When you publish the post, Micro.blog will automatically notice the u-in-reply-to, find the Webmention endpoint for the post you’re linking to, and send the Webmention for you. Micro.blog themes also handle the other details, like including your name and profile photo.
