Automatically sending Webmentions from a static website

A few months back I wrote about indieweb-ifying this website. I attempted to follow the excellent indiewebify.me guide, but I skipped step 2 of Level 2, i.e. adding the ability to send Webmentions to other IndieWeb sites. My excuse at the time was:

I decided to skip this step for now given that it's relatively easy to send a Webmention manually using curl and it's not as if I currently blog that frequently!

Anyway a couple of recent discoveries led me to fix this omission…

webmention.app

This lovely little service built by Remy Sharp, not to be confused with webmention.io which is used for receiving incoming Webmentions, makes it easy to send outgoing webmentions for all the links on a given page:

This is a platform agnostic service that will check a given URL for links to other sites, discover if they support webmentions, then send a webmention to the target.

Fortunately I still have an RSS feed for my blog and in this case the documentation suggests using IFTTT to automate doing this each time you publish an article.

Actionsflow

Somewhat serendipitously I recently came across Actionsflow which is a free Zapier/IFTTT alternative for developers to automate workflows based on GitHub Actions.

I have to admit that I was initially quite confused by the Actionsflow documentation and I tried to add my Webmention-sending workflow to the repo for this website. However, once I realised the idea was to create a new repo based on a template, things became a little clearer.

Workflow to send Webmentions

I created this repo and added this workflow to poll my RSS feed and send an HTTP POST request to the webmention.app API for every new item. I was pleasantly surprised by how simple this was:

name: Send webmentions for new blog posts
on:
  rss:
    url: https://feeds.jamesmead.org/floehopper-blog
    config:
      logLevel: debug
      limit: 1
jobs:
  send_webmentions:
    name: Send webmentions
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: 'Send webmentions for RSS item link'
        uses: actionsflow/axios@v1
        with:
          url: https://webmention.app/check/
          method: 'POST'
          params: '{ "url": "${{on.rss.outputs.link}}", "token": "${{ secrets.WM_TOKEN }}" }'
          is_debug: true

It took me a while to realise that the underlying Actionsflow GitHub Action was running every 5 minutes and polling my RSS feed. It seems to use the GitHub Action cache to "remember" which items it has seen before. Since I don't publish blog posts very often, polling every 5 minutes seemed a bit excessive and so I decided to reduce the frequency to hourly.

Observations

• I'm not sure I like the design of Actionsflow which means creating a new repo, but perhaps this would make more sense to me if I had more than one workflow. I suppose this repo is roughly equivalent to a single IFTTT account.

• Over the course of the last year I've automated some backup jobs for Go Free Range using the ScheduledFargateTask class in the AWS CDK to fire up a container and run a script on a cron schedule. This has worked really well, but it's quite tempting to port these over to Actionsflow so we don't have to maintain anything other than the Dockerfile and associated shell scripts.

• webmention.app is really nicely implemented with good documentation; it's a classic example of an elegant solution to a tightly scoped problem. Since I'll be making use of the API on a regular basis, I decided to buy Remy a drink to say thank you!

• I'd also like to find a way to say thank you to Aaron Parecki who built webmention.io and Ryan Barrett, Kyle Mahan, et al who built brid.gy. However, I can't see a way to do either and, indeed, the latter explicitly say "We don't need donations, promise."