Webmentions support

Hero image from Unsplash

Inspired by a few posts (Sebastian’s and Max Böck’s) on the internet, I wanted to add Webmentions to this site. I was previously using giscus to power comments, but I really like the idea of comments (and other things) being generated statically and served like the rest of the site. I get to own my spot on the web with this idea and that’s a big deal to me.

Services used

• Webmention.io
• Bridgy
• GitHub Actions

Webmention.io is written/maintained by Aaron Parecki and is open sourced. This is a hosted service that I can use to receive webmentions on my website.

Thanks to Bridgy, I’ll get any reposts, likes, and mentions from mastodon that contain a link to my website. Hopefully, something will exist for threads also once that API opens up.

GitHub Actions runs every so often to poll the webmention.io api and turns any new webmentions into a json file. Then astro does it’s thing and renders it on the right page.

The future

Somethings I still need to do:

• Make a page like this explaining how to comment
• Probably some tweaking on styling
• Create a master page where of webmentions

A super long term goal of mine would be create my own webmentions server so that I don’t have to rely on webmention.io and to allow webmentions to be updated closer to real time.

If you’re curious about the code, feel free to checkout the github repo. Don’t judge, but if you find issues or how to improve, then please raise a github issue.