Since November 2011, I’ve used the excellent static-site generator Jekyll to power this site. It’s a fantastic piece of software that’s grown by leaps and bounds since I first picked it up. In that time, as you’ve likely noticed if you’ve followed my recent writing, I’ve been working to integrate various IndieWeb concepts and features into the site.

Some IndieWeb features, like adding rel="me" to profile links, are easily achievable and fit nicely within Jekyll’s boundaries as a static HTML-generating tool. More dynamic features, like webmentions, require a service or application—something with the ability to respond to incoming requests.

In July, I wrote about the launch of my webmention endpoint. That small web app, living at webmention.sixtwothree.org, collects, verifies, and stores comments from around the web related to my posts. I then use JavaScript to pull those comments and display them on the relevant post over here on sixtwothree.org. It’s a simple little service: the webmention app accepts and verifies webmentions and provides a JSON API for retrieving webmention data by URL.

For instance, if I want to display webmentions for this post, I request the following URL:

http://webmention.sixtwothree.org/api/webmentions?target=http://sixtwothree.org/posts/open-sourcing-my-webmention-service

Asking for the content of that URL, parsing the response, and running the resulting data set through a series of templates yields the “Responses” section on each of my posts.

Open-Sourcing the Project

Earlier this week, after much dragging of feet and checking that I didn’t commit any sensitive, revealing pieces of code, I made public the GitHub repository for webmention.sixtwothree.org. It’s rough around the edges, but it works. Not bad for my first real attempt at a Ruby application, right?

The code is presented as-is and I’ve noted as much as I could in the README.md. If you find any glaring holes in the documentation, submit an Issue and I’ll try to fill in the gaps.

While I’m currently working on replacing Jekyll with my own custom-built CMS, I wanted to make the code for this project available to anyone who may find it helpful. It’s served me well and I hope you find it useful for implementing webmentions into your own project.