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!