Receiving Webmentions, Part 1

Tuesday, May 21, 2024

#indieweb #programming #webdev

Hi everyone! I recently set up my blog to receive Webmentions, which means that if somebody wants to link to one of my posts from their website, I can get a notification about their post. I like this because it allows people in the IndieWeb community to use our websites kind of like social media — to have conversations with each other — but outside of the silos of social media.

I got the basics taken care of for now, and in a future update I will make it easier for people to send them to me, as well as adding a way to display them as comments on the appropriate post.

How I Did It

I used Webmention.io for my Webmentions, which made the whole process pretty simple on my end. First I went to Webmention.io and signed in with my website. When you type your website URL into the sign in field, it looks for a rel="me" link. In my case, I have the following HTML tag in the <head> of my page:

<link rel="me" href="https://github.com/reillypascal" />

In other words, I'm using my GitHub account to sign in to Webmention.io. This is called RelMeAuth, and if you don't want to use a silo website such as GitHub, you can also use IndieAuth, which I will likely set up in the future.

If I type my URL into the login bar now, Webmention.io will redirect me to a login page where I can approve the sign-in via GitHub. Once I've logged in, I can simply place the following tag in the <head> of my homepage:

<link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/reillyspitzfaden.com/webmention" />

The general format is as follows (this is also given on Webmention.io once you've logged in):

<link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/<username>/webmention" />

Where "<username>" is usually the URL of your site.

One More Thing

At this point you could previously go here and see any Webmentions that came in. However, there is one new feature to be aware of. I tested out my site using the “Receiver Test #1” at webmention.rocks, and it was giving me a 404 error. When I talked to Webmention.io's creator Aaron Parecki in the IndieWeb chat, I learned that there are some new updates. As discussed in this GitHub issue, Aaron wants to prevent Webmention.io from automatically accepting mentions for anybody who does not explicitly ask for it. As a result, one final step is that you need to go here after signing into Webmention.io, and enter your site URL in the box. At this point, the receiver test worked flawlessly for me.

Going Forward

If you have Webmentions set up, please send me one if you link to my blog posts! I always appreciate connecting with other IndieWeb people. If you're just getting started with Webmention.io, you should be able to go to https://webmention.io/<username>/xmlrpc, where <username> is your site URL, and send me one. Soon I will be adding a field to my blog posts so you can submit the URL of your post right on my site. I will also make it so when you click the button to load comments, Webmentions I've received for the post will be displayed alongside the comments.

Fun Fact of the Day

Speaking of blogs, “blog” comes from “web-log,” but did you know that "log" (in the sense of “log-book”) comes from “log” as in a log from a tree? I like to browse Etymonline for fun, and the page for log (as in “log-book”) explains that sailors would place a chip of a tree log in the water on the end of a rope with knots at regular intervals, and used the rate at which the knots passed by to tell the ship's speed. Isn't etymology great?

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