My site now supports webmentions
1 min read
Ok you guys, I did it. I finally have webmentions (opens in a new tab) working on my website. It's something I've always wanted to do but it seemed too complicated with my setup. I use a static site generator (SSG), 11ty (opens in a new tab), to build my site. Bloggers who use SSGs often host their sites on something like Github pages, Netlify or something similar so they have access to a CI/CD pipeline which does the building for the site. I host my site on a VPS running Caddy and I just rsync my files to my server. No automatic build server.
I recently setup a homelab server though! I bought a used Intel NUC from eBay and loaded up Proxmox on it. So now, I have a poor man's build server! Yay.
Anywho, all that to say, my site now supports webmentions. It collects likes, boosts, bookmarks, mentions, and replies, whether they come from someone's own website or from Mastodon and Bluesky and shows them in the footer of the blog post. Hell yeah.
Also on Mastodon (opens in a new tab) Bluesky (opens in a new tab)
Thread
@michaelharley (opens in a new tab) Nifty! Testing 1, 2, 3 for an appearance on your site's comments from the Fediverse
@michaelharley (opens in a new tab) Wait - the reply doesn't appear on your site's comments.
https://michaelharley.net/posts/2026/06/10/my-site-now-supports-webmentions/ (opens in a new tab)
@pabloniusmonk (opens in a new tab) it's a timing issue. it's there now!
@pabloniusmonk (opens in a new tab) it's a timing issue. it's there now!
@michaelharley (opens in a new tab) I'm curious how it is pulling the mentions back. Is it javascript or is it actually grabbing this text somehow and including it as part of the next build of the page?
@techlifeweb (opens in a new tab) It's the second one, no JavaScript on the page. The interactions get collected by a service called webmention.io, and on each build my site pulls them from there and bakes them straight into the HTML. A separate tool called Bridgy is what turns the Mastodon/Bluesky likes and replies into webmentions in the first place. The build runs every few minutes, so new ones show up on the next rebuild.
@techlifeweb (opens in a new tab) It's the second one, no JavaScript on the page. The interactions get collected by a service called webmention.io, and on each build my site pulls them from there and bakes them straight into the HTML. A separate tool called Bridgy is what turns the Mastodon/Bluesky likes and replies into webmentions in the first place. The build runs every few minutes, so new ones show up on the next rebuild.
@michaelharley (opens in a new tab) Nice! I build with 11ty too. I'm using all of those but not currently pulling the mentions back and building them into the HTML. I'll have to look into that some more.
@michaelharley (opens in a new tab) I like the ? marks after my username. π πΊπ¦
@pabloniusmonk (opens in a new tab) Haha yeah I guess I should get the build server to strip out unknown instead of converting to question marks!
Testing local comments!
D Dale MellorΚΌs Blog (opens in a new tab) via khleedril.org
This is great. I'm actually at the point now where my only reactionary contributions to the datasphere are via webmentions.
I'm not too sure about webmentions.io though. A lot of people are starting to become dependent on this, and it is a single point of failure.
But the great thing about the Indieweb is, we all get to do it our own way!
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