Webmentions: the nice things we have
The tech is there for us, if we want it
You know it's obligatory for one to rewrite their blog from scratch every couple of years (months?). It's possible I may have found a solution for this because this blog has been up since 2022 and while I've been curious about other tools, I never found sufficient reason to replace it.
The winning tech seems to be the Wagtail CMS which is an opinionated configuration of Django. I never really spent too much time writing code for it (apart from a couple of custom components and tweaks to the Admin UI to make it fit my workflow).
In other words, having a system that's fit for purpose (publishing content on the web) is what keeps one from continuously trying to make static websites do things they were never supposed to do.
I posted recently about my current focus being syndication. At first, it seemed like a simple "just cross-post links to my blogs on all the socials" kind of solution. The more I've been thinking about it, however, the more I realised that may not be enough...
Social media platforms are changing all the time. From age verification, to whatever Bluesky thinks they need to somehow make people sign up for their service.
Imagine, it's 2027 and you can't post and/or see links unless you sign up for ATProto+ (they love copying Twitter so it's not a stretch to assume they would follow in Elon's footsteps).
Turns out, you don't need a special protocol to let your friends know you've written a post linking to their website. In fact, you don't even need a social network...
So there is an actual (recommended) server-side standard called Webmentions:
Webmentions is a simple way to notify any URL when you mention it on your site. From the receiver's perspective, it's a way to request notifications when other sites mention it.
Awesome, isn't it?
This means that if I post a link to an article on your website, and you've enabled webmentions, your server gets a notification with a link to the article I've written. And vis-versa. And it all happens in the background - there is no need to register an account, generate app passwords and any other side quests.
So my blog (this website) now supports webmentions. The inspiration for this feature was an article from Joshua Wood on the same topic (you should check it out).
So the question is not “Which social network are you posting on?” but rather “Does your website support webmentions?”
