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Can I verify myself on Mastodon using a Google Site with a custom domain?
I maintain a personal website, created through Google Sites, which is primarily used to host samples of my writing. The site has a custom domain.
Aside from just having a writing archive, though, I also have links to profiles of mine from across the web - including to my profile on Mastodon. Now, given that Mastodon's verification system requires having a personal domain that you can link to your profile from, I figured that I could just easily verify myself (because why not).
Mastodon requires that somewhere on your website, you need to embed a link to your profile with rel="me". Now, by default, Google Sites turns links into a Google redirect (i.e. it doesn't link directly to the target page, but links to google.com/url?=linkwithatracker instead. If you embed a link within HTML, though, it does link directly to the page that you want.
So I embedded a link to my Mastodon profile through the HTML, using the format of <a rel="me" href="https://mastodon.social/@superplane39">. Unfortunately... that didn't work.
I tried both with linking an image and just with text, neither of which was successful. My suspicion is that Google Sites is simply stripping the rel="me" from the link despite having a custom domain.
Is there any way I can verify myself on Mastodon via a Google Site with a custom domain, or am I stuck unverified until/unless I swap to a different method of building the site?
1 answer
Based on seeing other website auth and metadata protocols only, I'm expecting this to be of the form <head> ... <meta rel="me" href="https://mastodon..."> ... </head> .
When I fetched the page and looked at the source (with curl or in Firefox dev), and I only see mention of mastodon further down, and there it is encoded in a <div ... data-code="<a rel="me" ..." ...> element which surely makes it invisible to anything doing meaningful authentication.
You do have other metadata there, such as <meta itemprop="description" content="Hi, I'm Mithical, a writer and community enthusiast. "> so writing to head is possible; but these standard fields may be from a limited menu?
I haven't looked at the docs for Mastodon or Google Sites. If you'll excuse my laziness in not going and finding them, then I'll excuse yours in not pasting the link in the question. 😜
Now, by default, Google Sites turns links into a Google redirect (i.e. it doesn't link directly to the target page, but links to
google.com/url?=linkwithatrackerinstead.
Ugh. I guess it's to reduce splog referrer farms? Sure seems like the wrong way to do that.
However that didn't apply to the <meta itemprop="url" content="https://www.superplane39.com/"> you have. Again, possibly generated from a limited menu.
If you embed a link within HTML, though, it does link directly to the page that you want.
It's encoded for the consumption of Javascript; which when I visited with NoScript didn't even run. I think it's invisible there.
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