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TL;DR — For those who hyperlink on your Mastodon profile from CodePen, and your CodePen profile from Mastodon, your Mastodon profile will show your CodePen profile as a verified hyperlink, proving possession.
How does that paintings? It’s simply HTML!
There’s a rel characteristic that may pass on anchor (<a>) hyperlinks. The values for rel have quite a lot of capability. As an example, you’ll inform search engines like google and yahoo to not observe or rank a hyperlink and that it’s user-generated:
<a
href="https://user-generated.com"
rel="nofollow ugc">
Person Hyperlink
</a>There are protection and performance-gaining probabilities for the use of values like noreferrer and noopener as neatly.
Right here’s every other price: rel="me" (you’ll space-separate more than one values). The me price is a slightly old-school Microformats factor. It’s lovely neat! The aim is that you put it on hyperlinks that time to different issues that you personal or regulate. Then, if the hyperlink you’re pointing to issues immediately again additionally with a rel="me" hyperlink that may be a verification-of-ownership state of affairs. Because the wiki places it:
Thus setting up a bi-directional rel-me hyperlink and confirming that the 2 URLs constitute the similar particular person.
The federated social networking web site Mastodon (right here’s me!) makes use of this precise setup to make sure private hyperlinks. Right here’s a picture of my Mastodon profile:
Understand there are 3 hyperlinks, the primary two of which might be highlighted with checkmarks and inexperienced:
The ones “verified” hyperlinks are verified as a result of they observe the bi-directional rel="me" linking precisely as Mastodon calls for.
On CodePen, we’re now including that me price to all of the hyperlinks you upload on your profile. Mastodon does the similar, and thus verification is completed. On my 3rd hyperlink, that hyperlink to Amazon.com (clearly) doesn’t comprise a hyperlink again to my Mastodon profile, so it doesn’t test.
The Different Imaginable HTML to Test
Whilst CodePen is now correctly striking the me price on profile URLs — that in truth didn’t paintings for Mastodon verification on our first strive. There have been in truth two issues:
- CodePen profiles are client-side rendered, and the Mastodon crawler can simplest see server-side rendered HTML.
- We wanted to verify the Mastodon crawler didn’t get trapped via the firewall.
With that 2d one looked after by way of DevOps magic, we nonetheless wanted some way to verify the server-rendered HTML had one thing to make sure in opposition to.
We aren’t but server-rendering maximum of our React-rendered pages (we’ll get there), so the HTML that comes throughout that first request (and what Mastodon crawls) is basically a shell web page with minimum HTML. We may have tossed the <a rel="me" ...> hyperlinks into the <frame> of that first reaction, however that turns out slightly awkward to simply have them ripped away via client-side rendering right away. As an alternative, there may be every other similarly legitimate approach to supply rel="me" hyperlinks, and that’s like this:
<head>
<hyperlink rel="me" href="https://chriscoyier.internet/">
<hyperlink rel="me" href="https://front-end.social/@chriscoyier">So we’re in truth doing each the <head> hyperlinks and the <a> hyperlinks now, and excellent information, it really works nice.
Because of Will Boyd for asking about this and Amelia Bellamy-Royds for all of the back-and-forth on Mastodon as we figured all this out.
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