Re-enabling webmentions
A while back I wrote about creating a dedicated serverless webmention receiver for my site. It was pretty good and super reliable, but it existed in its own repo, used a different AWS toolkit & was separate from the rest of my site and backend. This lead to it sort of being abandoned and not maintained. Luckily, it was written quite robustly and still worked, but I was unhappy with it living separate to my existing backends CI/CD process, testing & standard toolset.
If you haven't read the previous post, webmentions are a standard
way of pinging a site to let them know that you've linked to them.
My site has the following tag in it's
<head>:
<link class="externalLink" target="_blank" href="https://api.pfy.ch/webmention" rel="webmention">
Posting to this URL with a JSON payload containing a
source (somewhere on your site) and a
destination (somewhere on my site) will add a little
backlink to your post on my webpage acknowledging that it's been
referred to elsewhere on the web! Obviously there are check's in
place, but it really is that simple. As long as the
source contains a direct link to
destination it gets through!
Just like with my previous implementation - I still haven't gotten around to actually pinging other peoples webmention endpoints from my custom CMS... It shouldn't be too difficult, I'm just a bit lazy and weary of pinging people too much.