Trouble with Conversation.js

[heyloura]

Hi! I’m trying to get conversations/webmentions showing on my blog. I have checked out this article: Replies with Conversation.js and have the checkbox checked. Unfortunately I’m getting a 404 on conversation.js loading on my site. Any ideas on how I can fix this?

Here is what it’s trying to fetch for one of my posts - https://micro.blog/conversation.js?url=https%3a%2f%2fheyloura.com%2f2022%2f11%2f08%2fawww-the-cats.html which looks correct …

[vincent]

Howdy.

Just had a look at this.

I can see it working on your site here - it’s the Tai Chi article.

You can see it working if you try this:

https://micro.blog/conversation.js?url=https://heyloura.com/2022/11/10/nothing-like-a.html

If there are no replies to other posts, it won’t return any “posts” as such, so that’s why you’re encountering the error message.

[sod]

Hey Loura! Have you recently moved your blog from heyloura.micro.blog to heyloura.com? Looks like your smart-cats-being-smart post was published before you activated your custom domain. Conversation.js sometimes gets confused when moving from one domain to another.

Conversation.js HTTP 404 since move to new domain/Cloudflare

Unfortunately, this will happen for all blog posts published before moving to the new custom domain. conversation.js fetches the conversation going on over at the Micro.blog timeline for a specific blog post. In this case, the script is saying, "Hey, give me all replies for the blog post at https://www.stratinator.com/2022/01/23/my-sundayswing-ideas.html". That URL was never sent to the Micro.blog timeline, and that’s the problem. At the time of posting, the URL was https://microblog.renem.net…

Theoretically, one could work around this problem by hacking around in your blog’s template and modifying Conversation.js. But it’s a bit involved. @mantion has mentioned before that he thinks Conversation.js could be improved upon.

[heyloura]

@sod that makes sense. I was waiting on moving my domain over while I was deciding if I wanted to commit to micro.blog. So I had a bit of activity under heyloura.micro.blog. Thanks for the explanation! I might try messing around with my theme to see if I can fix it (maybe fetching heyloura.com and if it fails trying for heyloura.micro.blog) and see if that works. If I manage to get anything working I’ll post it here for others to find.

[sod]

That’s a great idea. If you want to avoid the extra request, an alternative approach might be to figure out the post’s published date and make a decision based on that.

const publishedDateAsText = document.querySelector('.dt-published').textContent;
const publishedDate = new Date(publishedDateAsText);

// And so on…