I’m rather happy with the IndieWeb wiki: it’s at indieweb.org. It’s a great resource and has had great additions and documentation added to it over the years. Folks like gRegor and James and Tantek and many, many, many, others have made and improved terrific living history of independent websites. The topic is so large it can’t possibly encompass everything, but it does a lot. I take a very expansive view of what belongs on that wiki and advocate for that aim where I can.

The new large language model traffic, documenting a phenomenon which has perturbed many of us with independent websites this year, I am particularly proud of spearheading.

I wanted to check for webmentions on individual IndieWeb.org pages yesterday.

The wiki includes the code to accept webmentions:

<link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/indiewebcamp/webmention">

But they’re not displayed. And the site does not expose them to view to users. I have a tendency to check to see if websites accept webmentions using a bookmarklet. I use Brent Lineberry’s Supports Webmentions? bookmarklet. And last year I added a webmention explainer to the lab.

So I’ve known about the wiki supporting these for a while, and I even collect webmentions into my copy of the page for Front End Study Hall.

The way to get at the last 20 of them is with a url like this:

https://webmention.io/api/mentions.jf2?target=%FULL_URL%

I created a new bookmarklet to run on individual indieweb pages, and the output looks like:

The output displays in a popover. Clicked links appear in new windows. The bookmarklet and all the source code is at lab.artlung.com/indieweb-org-webmention-bookmarklet/.

Already it’s shown me a few interesting links from years past to the wiki. It showed off links to the IndieWeb Book Club posts from years past, such as by Chris Aldrich and David Shanske. The book club has been on hiatus, but will be revived next month by Zachary Kai. I even helped James track down a dead link on his site, which he was able to fix because of how webmention.io works, keeping a copy of the content originally sent.

I love a good bookmarklet. Web pages are raw material for connection-making. Whether that’s between people, or chunks of data, or organizations and people, the clay-of-web’s malleability helps me make meaning. Daily. I don’t really think of my website as earning the title “digital garden” but the more I make web stuff the more apt I see my web output as like that.

Thanks for reading. Now go make a web page.