Wednesday, November 23, 2022
A rabbit hole of webmentions
How hard could it be?
It's relatively straightforward,
or so I thought until I started going down this particular rabbit hole yesterday.
The first stumbling block is sending a webmention.
The protocol itself isn't that tough—just send a POST to an endpoint with the URL of my post,
and the URL of the post I mentioned and that's pretty much it.
But the issue I have is that I tend to link freely.
This one paragraph post has six links in it!
When I exclude links back to my own blog,
there are still three external links.
Do I check each one?
There are plenty of posts
(like this one)
where sending a webmention isn't something I want to do.
So I'm having a bit of analysis paralysis on how exactly I want to handle this.
For now,
it's a manual process.
The second issue is one of handling incoming webmentions. I get the incoming request, I make a bunch of checks, then I have to actually fetch a web page and therein lies the hook—HTTP is rather involved these days, what with three separate and largely incompatible versions and TLS to contend with and … well, I have some stuff I need to update before I can do all that. So for now, my webmention endpoint will just accept requests and email me the information. Maybe if I see just how much this is used in the wild will inform me of how much work would be involved. I don't know.
