Webmentions and POSSE improvements

This blog now accepts webmentions.

I used webmention.io and webmention.js for live rendering. You can see an example at the end of my old Bezier Curves post.

After my initial experiments with POSSE, I’ve made a few improvements to the system. Now shortform posts are syndicated to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Twitter, and the links to the syndicated posts are automatically added to the end of each post. I don’t have any automatic social media posting for longform posts yet, though I plan to add a very simple version of that soon.

I like the idea of webmentions, but the only time I ever saw it used on my old Wordpress blog was for “reblogging,” which is effectively copying and pasting someone else’s content into your own blog with attribution. I would much prefer people add their own commentary. It would also be nice if aggregators like HackerNews, Reddit, and similar would automatically send webmentions. Instead, I’ve found some small projects like capjamesg/hn-webmention that allow one to do it on demand, which I forked and freshened up. Now it’s running as a regularly scheduled GitHub action.

I also wanted to improve the way webmention.js renders HackerNews webmentions, so I forked it and made some modifications. Before, Hacker News webmentions rendered as a “bookmark,” with only the HN username and the article title. With my changes, it’s clearer the webmention is from a HackerNews post, and displays the submission date.

It would be nice to have similar tools for Reddit and other aggregators. However, this setup relies on the Algolia search API, and IIUC sites like Reddit have been locking down their APIs recently thanks to LLMs. But let me know if you have any ideas for popular aggregators.

The next thing I’d like to do is have a means to automatically send webmentions from my blog to pages that I link to in my posts. I’m not sure how best to do that, but a GitHub action that runs periodically and parses the markdown of my posts, might be sufficient.