#indieweb

I keep finding new gaps in my webmention implementation. Mentions coming in from Bluesky, Lemmy and Lobsters were showing up with no author at all, just a blank avatar and an empty name. Reddit and Hacker News bookmarks fared a bit better, with a username attached, but got flattened into a generic “bookmarked” icon with no indication of where the post had actually been shared. Lobsters mentions also carried the wrong published date. None of these felt like they were pulling their weight compared to a proper webmention from a blog or Mastodon.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time on the receiving end of webmentions, from adding support for them in the first place through to fetching them at build time and rendering them server-side so the discussion section doesn’t flicker in over JS. What I’d never actually done was send the other half. Every link I’ve ever made out to another IndieWeb site has just sat there, silently not telling anyone I’d linked to them.

My default for making coffee for two is a cafetière. French press if you insist. It requires almost no thought, produces a consistent result, and has no moving parts to break. When I’ve got a bit more time and want a cleaner cup for two or more, I’ll reach for a Bodum pour-over instead. When it’s just me, I’ve been using a Clever Dripper more lately (it suits the days where I want slightly more control without committing to the full V60 ritual). The Hario V60 was my main single-cup pour-over for a long time before that.

My daily reading is deliberate at this point. I’ve settled on a small set of tools that surface the kind of internet I actually want, rather than whatever’s performing well today.

Hyde from lazybea.rs runs a blog interview series called Over/Under, where bloggers rate a mix of topics as overrated or underrated, then pass a question along to the next person. I’m issue 61.

Back in 2022 I added webmention support to this blog. The implementation worked but it was entirely client-side, so the page would load, JS would fire, fetch from webmention.io, and render the results into the DOM. With JS disabled or on a slow connection, the discussion section was just empty. It worked well enough that I didn’t touch it for three years, but the rate-limit situation had been silently catching visitors out and eventually I started pulling at the thread.

I’ve been running Known as my social posting hub for a while now. It’s a solid IndieWeb-friendly CMS that handles status updates, photos, and syndication to various silos. Recently I upgraded my instance for the first time in about four years, which meant dealing with all the little tweaks I’d made to core templates over that time. Previously I’d just edited core files directly, which meant upgrades would wipe my changes. After four years I had no idea what I’d even modified (I’ll go into the archaeology of that in another post). This time I decided to do it properly, and ended up writing four plugins.

I’ve been fiddling with an instance of Known over on social.omgmog.net. As part of my fiddling I’ve been trying out some of the plugins for Known. I came across the “Render Emoji Unicode” plugin but it was using an old library, and referencing an old version of Twemoji, so I updated it to use the latest Twemoji library.

I’ve added Webmention support to the posts on this blog. Webmentions are a method for websites to know that they’ve been linked to (or mentioned) from elsewhere on the web.