Site Update: WebMention Support

Published on , 330 words, 2 minutes to read

Recently in my Various Updates post I announced that my website had gotten WebMention support. Today I implemented WebMention integration into blog articles, allowing you to see where my articles are mentioned across the internet. This will not work with every single mention of my site, but if your publishing platform supports sending WebMentions, then you will see them show up on the next deploy of my site.

Thanks to the work of the folks at Bridgy, I have been able to also keep track of mentions of my content across Twitter, Reddit and Mastodon. My WebMention service will also attempt to resolve Bridgy mention links to their original sources as much as it can. Hopefully this should allow you to post my articles as normal across those networks and have those mentions be recorded without having to do anything else.

As I mentioned before, this is implemented on top of mi. mi receives mentions sent to https://mi.within.website/api/webmention/accept and will return a reference URL in the Location header. This will return JSON-formatted data about the mention. Here is an example:

$ curl https://mi.within.website/api/webmention/01ERGGEG7DCKRH3R7DH4BXZ6R9 | jq
{
  "id": "01ERGGEG7DCKRH3R7DH4BXZ6R9",
  "source_url": "https://maya.land/responses/2020/12/01/i-think-this-blog-post-might-have-been.html",
  "target_url": "https://xeiaso.net/blog/toast-sandwich-recipe-2019-12-02",
  "title": null
}

This is all of the information I store about each WebMention. I am working on title detection (using the readability algorithm), however I am unable to run JavaScript on my scraper server. Content that is JavaScript only may not be able to be scraped like this.

Many thanks to Chris Aldrich for inspiring me to push this feature to the end. Any articles that don't have any WebMentions yet will link to the WebMention spec.

Be well.

Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

Tags: indieweb