thoughts and inspiration on designing, programming, and writing for the web
If all went well, this post was published automatically. I added the ability to schedule posts on my static blog (built with Hugo). I wrote a short GitHub Action to trigger a build on Netlify every morning.
Last year, I added webmentions to this blog. To recap, webmentions are a web standard to create a network of comments, likes, and reposts between ordinary sites. I set up a brid.gy account to poll Twitter for webmentions targetting my blog, and I caught them with webmention.io.
Webmentions were fetched with AJAX and rendered at the bottom of each page. There were two things I didn't like about this approach:
After some tinkering, I came up with an alternative: a cron-based GitHub Action that queries webmention.io for new webmentions. The Action then commits them to my site's repository, so I can access the data with my static site generator, Hugo.
I first noticed webmentions in the wild on Hidde de Vries' blog about two years ago. Last week it finally happened, I added webmention support to my blog too! Well, partial support at least. I'm now receiving and displaying webmentions. Sending them out is a project for another day.
This blog was a custom Laravel application for the past few years. While I was happy with the Laravel solution, I'm slowly trying to move away from maintaining my own servers. I'm also drawn to the simplicity and stability of serving plain html, so I decided to look into static site generators.
I quickly discovered that Hugo was what I was looking for. Hugo is a very fast and very popular static site generator.