As mentioned previously, I’ve spent much of the last year diving into the IndieWeb: learning as much as I can, following the latest developments, and building tools that will allow me to more easily publish on my own site. It’s been a slow, incremental process but today I’m excited to launch the first version of webmention.sixtwothree.org.

That’s right, this site now accepts webmentions! It’s a really basic implementation: a Sinatra app backed by a SQLite database that accepts properly-formatted webmentions. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done. For now, webmentions are stored and occasionally manually verified. There’s a small API that provides JSON-formatted webmentions for a given target URL. Along with a number of other enhancements and additions to better comply with the spec, I plan to use the API to display webmentions on posts here. I’ll also open source the whole thing as soon as possible.

That’s going to involve a little bit of JavaScript (and CORS) as this site is a collection of static files generated by Jekyll. No big deal, really. The critical content—the post—exists in the page’s markup. Displaying webmentions on this site is, I believe, an enhancement and should they not display for any reason, so be it.

(Incidentally, webmention.js came out of this past weekend’s IndieWebCamp and is a nice collection of code to do exactly what I’ll be doing here.)

As with my earlier Craft Webmention plugin, the webmention service I’m running here was developed and inspired by Aaron Parecki’s webmention.io project. The source for that is available on GitHub. I wouldn’t have been able to get the first pass of the service out the door either without Tony’s patient mentoring. Thanks, buddy!

It’s a pretty amazing time to be publishing content on your own site. There are a ton of great people working on tools to help themselves and others regain control of our content while retaining the social benefits of the various silos.