Alongside the revival of this blog through yesterdays post I also added a link
to my mastodon profile in its footer. My mastodon profile also had a link to
this blog in it for a long time, though it missed the little “verified”
checkmark next to it. In case you’ve not seen the mark I’m referring to or are
not present on mastodon / the fediverse yet (you should join, e.g.
here or here), you can see
it in this screenshot:

Getting it in there isn’t complicated and there’s several online
resources on achieving that.
Basically it’s just adding a URL in one of the mastodon profile metadata fields
and then linking back to your mastodon profile on that website with a
rel="me"
attribute.
<a href="https://chaos.social/@dwagenk" rel="me">My Mastodon Profile</a>
One thing I didn’t see mentioned anywhere: The link verification doesn’t appear
immediately, but needs some time. Apparently the mastodon instance server scans
those URLs periodically instead of every time the profile is viewed (sounds
like a reasonable design decision favoring lower load times). This irritated
me, because it needed more than 9 hours for the checkmark to appear on my
profile. The timespan got me thinking and double checking, whether I made any
mistakes linking back, but in the end waiting was just the best solution for
this problem…