Posting an event and RSVPing to it at the same time

Yesterday I had created an event post for an upcoming DoOO Meetup I’m hosting and syndicated a copy to Meetable. The sad, but predictable, result was a webmention being displayed on Meetable that duplicated all of the details including all of the invitations. This felt annoying to me, and I simultaneously thought that as the host, I also ought to officially RSVP for the event itself so that it didn’t appear like no one was going. Rather than go to the trouble of creating a stand-alone RSVP reply post, I thought, why not create a two-for-one bargain? So I naïvely added a class="u-in-reply-to" to the Meetable URL in my event and threw on a data tag to the front of the post like so:

<data class="p-rsvp" value="yes">I'll be hosting</data>

And of course, wouldn’t you know: it worked! The duplication of all the data on the syndicated copy disappeared, and in its place a smiling photo of me indicating that I’m attending.

Sadly, I’ve noticed that the WordPress Webmention plugin doesn’t seem to allow me to self-RSVP to my own original post within the same post. I thought I might try forcing it manually only to discover that Telegraph won’t allow the source and target to be the same URL. I also tried mention-tech which will apparently send it and report a success, but my site doesn’t seem to actually receive and display it. I will say this may be the only case I’ve run across in 5 years that I’d want to self-mention the same post and actually display the result.

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Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

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