A meaningful interaction has always two directions: sending and receiving. In this part of the post I want to show you how to receive Webmentions from other blogs participating in the IndieWeb.

As Hexo is a SSG it generates static HTML pages. This has the advantage that the pages can be hosted just about anywhere (in my case Github Pages, but also the disadvantage of not having a real backend. Therefore, we need an external service that acts as an Webmention endpoint, where other people can send their webmentions.

Aaron Parecki, co-founder of the IndieWeb, has made a service called webmention.io we can use for free. It is able to convert old-fashioned Pingbacks to Webmentions, supports deleting of unwanted mentions, has a Blocklist for blocking domains, Webhooks for real-time processing and last but not least an API to get all your Webmentions per page or per site.

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After you have created your new Hexo post with hexo new post "My Fancy Post" and spend a couple of minutes/hours/days on writing meaningful text, you publish it by running hexo generate and copying the generated HTML to your server.

Next step would be to inform all the blogs you linked to in your now published post, that you have done just that. You want to send Webmentions.

Good news: you don’t have to write your own solution to scan your article for external URL’s and sending Webmentions to their creators: Remy Sharp has done that already with his service webmention.app. It supports the long existing Pingbacks too and offers several ways to achieve your goal:

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It is cool to publish your thoughts on your own blog under your only domain and not only on big social media platforms, because that way you keep control over your content. But what makes Facebook, Twitter and others “social” is the interaction between the people. Likes, Retweets, Mentions, Replies are the fuel which drives them. But most of the blogging solutions offers only rudimentary interactions, in form of article comments. The comment hurdle is high because interacting on someone else’s site is different from interacting on what is supposed to be your own, such as your Twitter or Facebook feed.

The project IndieWeb and their approach of Webmentions, has the goal to fill this gap. As a W3C recommendation, it defines standards how the social interaction of independent blogging solutions can be technically implemented without the need of manual intervention. Let software do the job…

In this article I will only briefly go into the basics and then show an implementation solution for the SSG Hexo.

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