busybee fluffy rambles Notes

IndieWeb! What if we suddenly… swap sites?

No, not actual sites with actual content, but site runtimes. Set up a subdomain on our server and then set up someone else’s software on that subdomain and try to blog on it for a certain timeframe, like a week maybe?

This will allow us to test each other’s sites, including their onboarding procedures and UX. Also it may be fun!

I love this idea, mostly because I’m all in favor of getting more eyes on Publ (especially improving its documentation!), and I’d also love to see how other people are solving the various problems with web publishing.

FWIW, Pushl also handles incremental webmention updates, including support for removals of targets and deletions of articles. Right now the only thing I feel like it’s missing for most IndieWeb folks is h-feed support, which should be fairly easy to add (I just need to get around to it).

It also could do with some better retry logic (namely saving failures in a queue for next time), which is also On The List.

Hey there Matt, welcome aboard.

I also manually send webmentions for each link in an article, but it would be nice to make a script to do that hard work for me. Additionally, I should make accounts on more sites (like Twitter) and join a service like brid.gy to sync my content between them. I would also like to experiment with owning my issues and pull requests, but that’s a thought for another day.

In addition to webmention.js which Jamie already, uh, mentioned, I’ve also written a tool called Pushl which automates the sending of webmentions. I have it set to run as part of my post-publish git hook on my site’s repository, as well as in a cron job that runs every 15 minutes. It requires an RSS or Atom feed at present (adding h-feed support is on my TODO list) but it only uses the feed for post discovery, rather than for target discovery, so it doesn’t need to be a full-content feed or whatever. It also maintains state so it can handle deletes and edits and so on.

There’s a few other automated Webmention sending things out there, like a lot of IndieWeb folks use webmention.app which can be used in combination with IFTTT, although I can’t speak to the reliability of that solution.