Chris Aldrich is way too kind, but it is the kind of kindness I need. A couple of quick responses:

I will indeed tweak the regex as you suggest. That behaviour by reading.am does rather spoil using it as a repository for links I want to go back to, but hey ho. On posting to Wayback Machine, I thought I saw a blog post from Reading that this was now done automatically for all saved posts. Getting things into my Known stream is on the horizon, but I will have to learn a lot more about how to use the web publish tools.

The webmention form is now looking good and working well, and I think I may even have got email notifications up and running, thanks once again to great help from the IndieWeb community. I'm not happy submitting anything to the original plugin, because it is so very different in scope and approach. But I am definitely thinking about creating a plugin of my own, which would also make it very easy to send the notification email. That's definitely on the cards. Putting it all on the wiki is next on my list.

And thanks again for being a guide and an encouragement.

I think we're on about the same level, Rob, Gen 2 with a smattering of Gen 1, and I agree with most of the points you make. A couple of observations:

The real time Q&A is tricky, although I have found that using the !tell command to a named individual is handy, once you have made some friends on IRC. Slack works well too. I tend to either review the IRC logs or catch up on Slack and if I see something on which I can maybe help, I dive in.

I also think that the wiki is at different times too verbose and too terse and links, but I have been reluctant to dive in, even though I know all changes are reversible. I wonder how hard it would be to do an alternative beginners version of the important pages, with links back and forth. Very easy, probably. There must be an easy way for one of the gurus to tell us which pages are visited most often.

I'm alone in a big city with no other indiewebbers that I'm aware of, but I try to join the virtual IWC and the people there have been super helpful. You might want to give that a try. Mind you, I have no idea what timezone you are in ... Most likely UK, but possibly not.

As for your final paragraph, all I can do is echo and say Amen.

.@schmarty Thanks to your terrific write-up I amazed myself and got #Audiogram working. Looking forward to trying it for real.

Really interesting write up from Marty McGuire about how he made use of WNYC's Audiogram to create audio snippets to syndicate to silos. Aside from the use of Docker -- which I don't understand in the slightest -- this seems like something I could manage. clammr was a complete bust for me. It'll be interesting to see how this works out for Marty, whether it brings new listeners.

Meanwhile, in California, pollution is coming from somewhere else entirely ... http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/08/pollution-from-illegal-pot-farms-is-way-worse-than-we...

@_MatthewDillon And, of course, you won't be surprised to learn that we got a lot of utterly misdirected flak for that.

Of course, and I wasn't suggesting for a minute that not being able to grok something is any reason to give up on it.

It was more my way of excusing myself from having so much difficulty understanding what was happening in the black box without opening it up to investigate fully.

In the meantime, my Mom uses FB (but not Twitter) and doesn't see much from me there because I don't cross-post much. And we're both OK with that.

Not sure whether you mean incoming webmentions or outgoing webmentions that aren't working, but for outgoing, there's no class="u-in-reply-to" on your post about Colin Walker's post.

@TamarHaspel True; just as bread, beer and wine aren't biotechnology.

@EarbudsPodCol Hey, thanks. Anything I can do to help?