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…

This post is part of the #15WeeksToBlog challenge.
Week 1/15, 2nd post this week.

Feel free to contact me via mail or mastodon if you’ve got any notes on this post or start a public discussion via this blogs github issue tracker. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed to stay tuned!