Photo for HWC Baltimore 2017-02-08

Webmentions are one of the most interesting and powerful technologies floating around the IndieWeb. At their most basic, they sites on the web to interact by sending a notification when a page on one site links to a page on another. When combined with machine-readable metadata like microformats2, they enable really neat social interactions between sites, feeding back likes, comments, bookmarks, shares, event RSVPs, and plenty more.

Receiving Webmentions

A site doesn't have to do all its own Webmention handling, and there are a few services that will handle them for you. I set up my website with the Webmention.io service back in August 2016 (so long ago!) and it's been accepting mentions from other sites since then. And, while there aren't a lot of websites that send Webmentions natively, there are services like Bridgy which uses Webmentions to backfeed social interactions to my site from sites like Facebook and Twitter. Pretty neat!

Sending Webmentions

When I publish a post with a link to a site that support Webmentions, I still need to actually send that notification. I haven't yet built a tool that does that for my own website, but I have been able to make use of Aaron Parecki's Telegraph, which will take in a link to one of my posts and parse it for outgoing links, find out of the targets of those links support Webmentions, and allow me to send them with the press of a button. It's ridiculously easy to use and has the added benefit of letting me pick-and-choose which links go out as Webmentions.

Displaying Webmentions

Webmention.io has been collecting mentions for my site for something like 6 months, but they don't just magically show up on my site! Webmention.io provides an API for fetching the mention data for individual pages, or all mentions for my domain.

My site is built on Jekyll, a static site generator, and I like that so far it doesn't rely on JavaScript for folks to read it. I didn't want to require JavaScript for displaying mentions, so I needed a way to "bake in" my mentions for each post. I was inspired by Aaron Gustafson's jekyll-webmention_io, but found that I didn't like some of the choices in markup or the way that it stored the mention data, so I went ahead and wrote my own. It's still heavily a work-in-progress, but I do hope to release it for other folks to use once it's more stable.

What works? Let's see!

Here's an example post with some Likes and RSVPs (both "yes"es and "maybe"s):

And an example post with some replies backfed from Facebook:

All of these are being displayed with the data that Webmention.io provides with its API, and there are some types of post that I would like to handle differently such as the ❤️ above (which was a Facebook "heart" reaction), and I'd like to include a JavaScript enhancement that will show any new mentions, so they aren't sitting in "limbo" until I make a new post.

Overall, I'm really excited to finally be showing these on my site! I think Webmention is a pretty critical part of bringing the "social web" into the IndieWeb and back out of the silos. I am grateful to all the folks that have made this possible with their work on standards and tools!

Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for March 11th - 17th, 2017.

You can find all of my audio editions here.

You can subscribe with your favorite podcast app on huffduffer.

Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11

Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!

Earlier this week I announced Screech, a simple client for posting audio content (such as podcasts) to your own site using Micropub.

I’m pleased to announce that Screech is now available publicly. You can check it out at https://screech.schmarty.net/.

Screech also now has an adorable logo, thanks to a couple of pieces of public domain art.

• Owl from LumoSpark
• Microphone from OpenClipArt-Vectors

I've been working on my idea of what IndieWeb podcast publishing looks like for some months now, both with the improvised We Have to Ask comedy podcast that I make with Jonathan Monroe and more recently with the This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition that I started producing last month.

In addition to following standard IndieWeb-friendly practices like using microformats2 feeds, backfeeding social interactions from Twitter and Facebook with bridgy, and exploring other interesting audio markup tricks, I wanted a tool that made it easy for me to publish new content to my sites via the Micropub protocol, which supports sending audio media files.

I didn't see another micropub client in the wild that supported audio files in the way that I wanted, so I made my own.

Screech is an audio-publishing-focused micropub web client with a Python server component built on Flask. Screech supports logging in with your own site using indieauth and posts to your site's micropub endpoint.

It's still a work-in-progress, but the basic flows work well enough for my needs.

One fun feature of Screech is that once you select an MP3 file for upload, it uses the jsmediatags library to pull out information about the track, such as its duration, track title, album and artist info, etc. This info is outside the scope of the Micropub standard, but if you want to add support to your server, you'll see those properties arrive with names like "id3-title", "id3-artist", etc.

Edit, March 17, 2017 — Screech is available at screech.schmarty.net. If you'd like to run it yourself, add features, or fix bugs, you can find the source code and instructions on GitHub.

Edit, November 30, 2022 — Screech has been rewritten in PHP. The new version is available at screech.bayside.pub. If you'd like to run it yourself, add features, or fix bugs, you can find the source code and instructions on my Git server.

There are many TODOs yet on my plate for Screech before I'd consider it "done", such as micropub media endpoint support, syndication support, adding a photo to the post as a "poster" image, and more.

I'd love to hear feedback from the IndieWeb community! What do you think it means to be an "IndieWeb podcaster"? What features would make Screech useful for you?

Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for March 3th - 10th, 2017.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback so far! In responding to a couple of listener requests, I slowed my speaking rate down for this week’s updates. However, because I am re-using some common clips, it sounds like I am speeding up and slowing down quite a bit. My apologies for any confusion this causes! I plan to re-record the common samples soon.

You can find all of my audio editions here.

You can subscribe with your favorite podcast app on huffduffer.

Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11

Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!

Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for February 25th - March 3rd, 2017.

You can find all of my audio editions here.

You can subscribe with your favorite podcast app on huffduffer.

Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11

Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!

A common IndieWeb principle, after "Own Your Data" is Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere .

In general, this means that you should make posts on your own site, then copy the post to silos like Twitter, Facebook, etc., to reach the folks in those communities. To complete the process, include links on your site from the original post out to the syndicated copies.

One fun reason to do this is that tools like brid.gy use syndication links in order to backfeed comments and reactions from silos like Facebook and Twitter to your own site.

I'd been collecting these links for a while and displaying them in a "hidden" way - so tools like bridgy could see them, but a human reading the page would not.

Yesterday I added a "See also:" section that includes links out to any syndicated copies of my posts on other sites.

Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for February 18th - 24th, 2017.

You can find all of my audio editions here.

And maybe you can subscribe with whatever you consume podcasts with on huffduffer.

Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 48 - Glitch, Day 9, Day 11

Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!