Day 40: reverting repost changes

I changed my mind about reposts, again. This is what we call voortschrijdend inzicht in Dutch.

A few days ago, I changed how I display reposts. In an attempt to honor copyright, I only display the first 50 words of a repost. This way, it's more a quote than a full copy of the content, but I can still retweet stuff, since cramming 50 words into 140 characters is doable, but rare.

What's more: I only showed the repost in the feed, not on my permalinked pages. I redirected those permalinks to the original permalink. This way, while I had the original content imported on my site, I wasn't actually re-publishing much of it.


But today I reposted a much reposted post of Aaron, and then it stuck me: I can't send a webmention, in the 'oh look a comment' kind of way, if I don't have a permalinked page with Microformats onĀ it.

In a way, a 302 redirect has the URL of another page on it by using a HTTP Location header, so it does link back to the original page. The question is then: is that a valid link for sending a webmention? And: does a 302 redirect on the source URL to the target URL imply a repost of the target? Not really, I think. It's just a redirect.

So I got rid of the redirect of my permalinks, giving my reposts their page back. I still only display the first 50 words of a repost, making it more a quote than a repost. But aren't reposts just full quotes? It's still the major part of the content of the post. I will keep it that way for now.


Edit 20:17 CET After some discussion on IRC, I decided to also ditch the 50-word-cutoff. Only showing the first 50 words of a repost makes it a quotation, not a repost.

The need for the 50-word-cutoff was born because I felt uneasy reposting a whole article. The solution to that is: don't repost a whole article. The problem was that I already reposted a whole article, because at that time, I found it important to keep it online, in case the original server would collapse under a lot of trafic. The next day, that wasn't a reason to keep it on my site anymore.

So, I changed that single post to a bookmark (replacing only repost-of to bookmark-of in the .txt of my post) and now I'm good again. I removed the code that showed only the first 50 words. If I ever want to quote something, I can use quotation-of, but for now, I'm fine.