Site updates: /mentions page and notifications
Jonathan Prozzi and I have challenged one another to make a post about improving our websites once a week. I'm a little late with this one!
I recently added support for displaying mentions, such as likes, reposts, comments, etc. from around the web that refer to the posts on my site. One thing the update didn't do is catch another type of mention, such as when someone mentions me in a tweet (example). These get fed to my website by brid.gy, but weren't displayed anywhere.
So, I created a /mentions page for displaying these mentions. In the future, when a post mentions my homepage, the result will show up on the mentions page.
My mentions still don't yet update in real time - they are compiled into my site whenever I make a new post. That's coming up in the future, but I have taken one more step towards real-time interactions with notifications!
Webmention.io, the service that I use for accepting and storing webmentions, has a WebHook option that can notify your site whenever a new webmention has been received. I wrote up a simple Python service using Flask that will listen for these messages from webmention.io and send them to me via PushBullet, a notification service that I've been using for a while for other projects.
Now, I'll see a notification on my phone and laptop when another site sends me a webmention!
Update: Here's an example notification!
Likes
Mentions
Marty McGuire
at
said:
Jonathan Prozzi and I have challenged one another to make a post about improving our websites once a week. This one should have gone up last week! A few weeks ago I posted some thoughts about my IndieWeb setup called "Easier POSSE with Micropub Edits?" in which I wished for a tool that would let me take a given post from my site, syndicate it to silos like Twitter and Facebook (tweaking the content if I want), and updating the post on my site to show the links to those syndicated copies. Why? I …
Marty McGuire
at
said:
Jonathan Prozzi and I have challenged one another to make a post about improving our websites once a week. This is me getting back on the train! In a previous site update I wrote about setting up a system to notify me whenever my site received webmentions. Essentially, this meant that I could now get notifications on my phone and desktop whenever somebody interacted with my site, such as: replying to one of my posts on their own site, retweeting or favoriting one of my posts, or even RSVPs to …
Andy Bell
at
said:
Ah that’s handy, I could just handle that webhook myself and deal with the moderation then. Thanks, all 🙂
Nicolas Hoizey
at
said:
You’re welcome! I have to work on Webmentions too, so everything around it is interesting to follow.
For about a week, I’ve been able to receive webmentions but they haven’t been visible on my site. That is a bad experience for several reasons: The first is that it seems strange for someone to send a webmention and if they visit my site later to see that there’s no reference to the feedback they sent me. Second, it’s not very enjoyable for me to look at my site and then to have to do some behind the scenes stuff to see if anyone has responded to my posts. So that has all changed now! Currently, …