Webmentions on a static site with GitHub Actions
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:
- I'd rather just have them prerendered by Hugo, my static site generator
- Webmentions are stored on Webmention.io, but I'd rather have ownership over them
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.