I’ve launched a new micro-blog at stream.bitworking.org, which has an Atom Feed if you want to follow along. You can also follow along on Mastodon by following @stream.bitworking.org@stream.bitworking.org thanks to https://fed.brid.gy/. Any entries will also appear on Twitter thanks to https://brid.gy. Interactions on any of those sites should flow back to Stream thanks to webmention support via github.com/jcgregorio/webmention-run. Finally the admin interface to Stream is a PWA that supports the Web Share Target API, which means I can trivially share content to Stream using the native Android Share intent.

I just published webmention-run, a Google Run application written in Go that implements Webmention. I’m now using this to handle webmentions on bitworking.org. Given the generous free quota for Google Run I don’t expect this to cost me anything. This is on top of using Firebase Hosting to host the static (Jekyll) parts of my blog, which is also effectively free. Another awesome feature is that both services will provide SSL certificates; in my case Firebase Hosting provides the cert for https://bitworking.

Brid.gy has a cool feature for automatically posting blog posts to Twitter, which is interesting because it uses Webmentions to kick off the whole process. I.e. just including the link: <a href="https://brid.gy/publish/twitter"></a> The webmention sent to brig.gy triggers it to look back at the post, parse it and look for microformats indicating what content to publish, and then posts it to Twitter. Note that this also works for Facebook and Flickr, and you obviously need to authorize brid.

As Chris suggested, I have gone beyond my minimal webmentions, and thanks to the heavy lifting of Will Norris, I got to avoid handwriting a microformats parser in the process. This is what they should look like in action:

Chris Aldrich has the honor of being the first sender of an organic incoming Webmention received on bitworking.org, which you can see on this post. I say “organic” because I’ve been using all the testing tools listed on the indieweb.org site to test my implementation.

Chris Aldrich I suspect that next, with a tad bit of parsing using microformats, you can add some display elements to your webmentions to indicate the author, their url, date/time, and actually include the reply text to have a better UI for them. Indeed, my current implementation just shows the validated Webmention links, and my plan is to slowly enhance them over time. I think, just like in the case of the basic Webmention support, Will Norris may have my back again and have already done the heavy lifting for Microformats and Go.

Ryan Barrett celebrating over 1 Million Webmentions in the wild. Not bad for a specification that only became a recommendation a year ago.

In A Decade of Silos Has Throttled Open Content Distribution Louis Gray says: To properly make the Web as desirable and viable a platform for publishing, we need to work together to fix the distribution and discovery gaps, make content fantastic on mobile for creation and consumption, and allow for engagement that is as simple as a Like. Totally agree. I’m in the process of implementing WebMention on the blog, in the hope that it gets more traction.