In reply to Khürt Williams.

A lot of the infrastructure for the plugins is contingent on having a theme that is properly marked up with microformats, so using themes that don't (and switching amongt them) is likely to give you the mixed bag of results you've been experiencing. This is certainly a known issue that many have been working on fixing. A recent method for working around it (at least temporarily) involves installing and activating the mf2 feed plugin and ensuring that you've at least got a reasonable h-card on your posts, either by using the widget built into the IndieWeb Plugin or manually writing one (this is the option I've taken) and putting it on the page.

As for your mentions page, I've written a tad about how I did it myself when things were more manual, but I've updated it with details for doing a bit more automatically by using built in settings available at /wp-admin/admin.php?page=webmention#webmention_support_pages. It will only collect mentions that are sent to your homepage/root URL islandinthenet.com. (If it's set up properly, this will hopefully serve as a test.)

Your best bet for pingback troubleshooting (presuming you've got them turned on--and if they aren't then I don't think that receiving webmentions will work either--/wp-admin/options-discussion.php) is to hop into the IndieWeb chat and ask David Shanske (aka GWG) who does a lot of the webmention plugin and is the core maintainer for the pingback module for WordPress.

Hope this helps...