webmention.io VS hugo-site

Webmentions (webmention.io) are a way to bring social activity and interactivity to your site without having it on your platform itself or needing to have complex systems in place. Harness the activity, audience, and functionality from existing platforms.

async function getMentions(url) { let mentions = []; let page = 0; let perPage = 100; while (true) { const results = await fetch( `https://webmention.io/api/mentions.jf2?target=${url}&per-page=${perPage}&page=${page}` ).then((r) => r.json()); mentions = mentions.concat(results.children); if (results.children.length < perPage) { break; } page++; } return mentions.sort((a, b) => ((a.published || a['wm-received']) < (b.published || b['wm-received']) ? -1 : 1)); }

Webmentions: https://webmention.io/

In the interim, I found myself pondering why every webmentions-on-Hugo solution I’d ever found up to now used JavaScript, rather than trying to do it purely in Hugo. After all, Hugo sports plenty of data-grabbing horsepower. For example: in my own experience to date, I’ve found Hugo's getJSON feature just as useful as the node-fetch on which the aforementioned JS relied to grab data from webmention.io.

One of the building blocks for such a system might be something like:

https://webmention.io/

{ "type": "feed", "name": "Webmentions", "children": [ { "type": "entry", "author": { "type": "card", "name": "Jon Kuperman", "photo": "https://webmention.io/avatar/pbs.twimg.com/a52326c0080bba610767505756be327891f63722c0ceb6515de5840097c65cb9.jpg", "url": "https://twitter.com/jkup" }, "url": "https://twitter.com/jkup/status/1365400108016291841", "published": "2021-02-26T20:35:28+00:00", "wm-received": "2021-02-26T21:23:21Z", "wm-id": 1048723, "wm-source": "https://brid.gy/comment/twitter/raymondcamden/1365399913987792900/1365400108016291841", "wm-target": "https://webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/", "content": { "html": "hello!\n\"u-mention\" href=\"https://twitter.com/raymondcamden\">\n\"u-mention\" href=\"https://webmentions.vercel.app/\">\n\"u-mention\" href=\"https://www.raymondcamden.com/\">", "text": "hello!" }, "in-reply-to": "https://webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/", "wm-property": "in-reply-to", "wm-private": false }, { "type": "entry", "author": { "type": "card", "name": "Jonathan Bossenger", "photo": "https://webmention.io/avatar/pbs.twimg.com/211d2d7837e89b60b4399dfc76f5aa3aad8b2d792335f08ecd65ce6c73da48cb.jpg", "url": "https://twitter.com/jon_bossenger" }, "url": "https://twitter.com/jon_bossenger/status/1365402390212587527", "published": "2021-02-26T20:44:32+00:00", "wm-received": "2021-02-26T21:23:17Z", "wm-id": 1048721, "wm-source": "https://brid.gy/post/twitter/raymondcamden/1365402390212587527", "wm-target": "https://webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/", "content": { "html": "I assume the copy of Edge runs on Ubuntu? \"https://webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/\">webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/\n\"u-mention\" href=\"https://webmentions.vercel.app/\">", "text": "I assume the copy of Edge runs on Ubuntu? webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/" }, "mention-of": "https://webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/", "wm-property": "mention-of", "wm-private": false }, { "type": "entry", "author": { "type": "card", "name": "? cannot even", "photo": "https://webmention.io/avatar/pbs.twimg.com/1f2ab7fe8fb6c20b4a2be803b95f6559677d0b88577a091c2b1755f70dff4247.jpg", "url": "https://twitter.com/diffalot" }, "url": "https://twitter.com/diffalot/status/1365406879459860480", "published": "2021-02-26T21:02:22+00:00", "wm-received": "2021-02-26T21:23:06Z", "wm-id": 1048716, "wm-source": "https://brid.gy/post/twitter/raymondcamden/1365406879459860480", "wm-target": "https://webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/", "content": { "html": "Testing webmentions Alpha Post \"https://webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/\">webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/", "text": "Testing webmentions Alpha Post webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/" }, "mention-of": "https://webmentions.vercel.app/posts/alpha/", "wm-property": "mention-of", "wm-private": false } ] }

This month, I took my site squarely into npm-ville when I brought in the npm version of Sass and added PostCSS to make "future" CSS work with current browsers. As it turns out, those changes made my site an unexpectedly appropriate target for the use case that Hugo Installer presents. I’m sure I’ll find nits to pick over time but, for now, I’m impressed by what I’ve seen.

Fortunately, while there are limits to how much you’ll be able to improve your experience with online search in general, you can optimize your own website’s search capabilities. That’s assuming, of course, that your website is built with a static site generator (SSG), as I’ve recommended on my own website over the years, and has search capabilities in the first place. If it lacks search, you can fix that readily enough with the free Pagefind tool about which I wrote earlier this year.

In Line 2 of the partial that I use for the search bar and results, I comment out the line of code that calls to the Pagefind CSS. (I derived it from the Pagefind documentation.) It's this step for which I can't find the corresponding code in your repo, but I'm sure you know where it is; and that's the key to this.

(a.) My own site, https://www.brycewray.com --- currently hosted on Cloudflare Pages, although it's also been on other Jamstack hosts such as Netlify, Vercel, and (briefly) Render.

although I (b.) also sometimes put stuff on dev.to.

Thanks! I will at some point. The code — in its current, very “as-is” state — is in my repo at (as of now) https://github.com/brycewray/hugo_site/blob/main/layouts/partials/webmentions-pipes.html if you can bear its spaghetti-ness. But, assuming you mean you’ll want a walk-through explanation: yes, that’s yet to come. There are some things I need to refine, first.

When I have the code somewhat DRY-er, I’ll write about it. In the meantime, I’ve left the following comment within the webmentions-pipes partial template I’m using to suck all this into each applicable post, just in case the curious happen to find that partial on the site repo:

By Bryce Wray

Having just moved my own site to Astro yesterday after a week or two of experimentation and grunt work, I can offer some opinions which may help you with that question. I’ll go through the “boxes” which I believe any SSG or other website development platform should “check” before you should give it a shot at this task, along with how I judge Astro’s ability to do so in each case.