Willy

Hey sorry it's John again. Do you know about Webmention? It's sort of like whatever "Trackbacks" were—you advertise an endpoint in the metadata of your webpage, and when another webpage links to that page, the author of that page can choose to ping your webmention endpoint and let you know. You can then publish that link on the original page if you want to, like it's a comment, or you can just treat it like a notification that someone had something to say to or about something you said. It's neat!

There's a free hosted service called Webmention.io that allows you to receive webmentions on a static site. They all get collected for you in a third-party interface that is also available as a private RSS feed.

Sending webmentions is left as an excercise for the reader! You can absolutely do this manually after you publish something, which is probably the easiest way to get started. Personally, when I'm posting stuff, there aren't that many outgoing links, and fewer still to other people's personal sites that I think might be listening for webmention calls, so it's not so tedious to just send them out with cURL (or httpie[https://httpie.io/cli] which is like cURL but more pleasant if you're mostly making HTTP requests) but I bet somebody has made a tool that accepts a URL to your post and will detect and make Webmention calls on your behalf. If that tool doesn't exist, maybe someone should make it! Maybe it'll be you! Maybe it'll be me.

If you want to get this set up in a real quick and dirty way, webmention.app has a mode where you can just plug your RSS feed into it and have it automatically send mentions to any links you include on your site. It's so easy! Give it a shot!

brid.gy is another thing that can do webmentions.

first of all "British Columbia" as a name sucks. there's no longer any need to be British, and Columbia comes from the river Columbia which comes from the ship Columbia which comes from Christopher Columbus and that sucks. I propose that it be renamed to Boreal Cascadia (Cascadie boréal):

• retains its initialism in both English and French
• more factually accurate (part of it is quite boreal, and part of it is in Cascadia)
• sounds cooler

the fact that a simple internet search revealed that the suggestion had already been made by dozens of other people on the internet is only evidence that it is a reasonable and suitable name

second of all if we're getting rid of the British in the name we have to get rid of the British in the flag. NO more union jack NO more crown. I propose the above flag with the following features:

• we can keep the waves. it's supposed to represent the Pacific and the Rockies and those sure are still there
• removed the ugly spokes of the sun and put it in the back bc let's be real there's hardly that much sun in BC to feature it so prominently
• added some trees which are literally the most prominent feature of the province between the ocean and the mountains like how could the original flag NOT have any trees at all (the green is stolen from Yukon's flag btw)
• (idk how to draw trees so I made them out of triangles for now. I'll go steal some trees from elsewhere later)
• the background looked empty so I made it Canada Flag Red for the BLOOD OF OUR ENEMIES