Thank you for giving me a reason to make an ask component. 🙂

When I include a repost like this in my Atom feed, I treat it as though the post I'm reblogging is itself in the feed, rather than a wrapper that contains that post. Generally speaking, As such, most of the metadata (author name, link, title if it has one) is in the rest of the feed entry rather than in the HTML contents. I don't create embeds directly from feeds—I always go to the source web page and create the embed from that—but if I were to do so, I'd treat all that metadata the same way I treat h-entry metadata for sites.

I also always wrap the things I'm embedding in some extra markup to get the nice little boxes…

I was all set to set up a custom Tumblr scraper so I could reblog art and stuff on here, but it turns out Tumblr already uses the h-entry microformat out of the box! I don't have to do anything special at all! Except maybe to handle reblog chains, but that's something I should really do anyway.

I've added WebMention support, both sending and receiving (although not currently displaying). I'll write more about that later. I've tightened up the microformats I'm using, particularly including them on nested embeds. It's fun and I'm happy to have this blog set up to play real nice with all these interoperable standards... but so far I don't know anyone else who I can actually interoperate with.

Thrilled to announce that I now have this up and running, at least in its most basic aspect. The embed above is automatically generated and pulled down directly from the source post. Nothing in this is specific to my blog; I can also do it with someone else's. By way of example, please enjoy this post from my beautiful wife:

Injecting embeds

Here's what the embed looks like in my blog source right now:

{% genericPost "https://nex-3.com/blog/once-i-add-the/",
    date: "2024-09-20T07:06:00Z",
    tags: "#meta",
    author: "Natalie",
    authorUrl: "/",
    authorAvatar: "/assets/avatar.webp" %}
  <p>
    Once I add the ability to embed arbitrary blog posts from other blogs on
    here it's over. I'm gonna be reblogging like a wild animal. Y'all are gonna
    have your eyes blown clean outta your heads.
  </p>
{% endgenericPost %}

I have a template for the embed, some CSS to style it, and a little custom Liquid tag to bring it all together. But the real magic is in how I generate the genericPost in the first place. Here's what the original source looks like before I run my embed injector on it:

 
https://nex-3.com/blog/once-i-add-the/

That's it! Just a URL surrounded by empty lines. The injector pulls down the webpage, extracts critical information about the blog post, and replaces the URL with a call to genericPost. My Letterboxd and Cohost embeds work the same way, with their own custom templates and metadata that let me match the style of the original websites.

Structured post data with h-entry

But I did say that this wasn't specific to my blog. With Letterboxd and Cohost, I've just hard-coded their HTML structure. I can't rely on that if I want to get information from any old blog, though. They all use different HTML structures!

So instead, I'm making use of the h-entry microformat. This is a tiny little specification that defines a way to mark up an existing post to indicate metadata in the existing HTML structure. At its simplest, it's just a few class names annotated with the HTML. Here's the simplified HTML for the post above:

<article class="h-entry">
  <p class="attribution">
    <a href="/blog/once-i-add-the/" rel="canonical" class="…