A new major site upgrade removes the forum integration and brings support for webmentions.

Header image: “Impressionist pastel drawing of an oval spaceship that’s one big computer” (AI-created artwork by Midjourney)

It’s been almost two years since the last major update¹ of the FAB INDUSTRIES website, but the time has now come. Version 2.2.00.000.ea8f8c2a brings only one big change, which once again affects how you can leave comments on this blog: I’ve removed the integration of my Discourse forum in favour of a new Webmention implementation.

The reason for this change is twofold. Firstly, as I’d explained in my post about the restructuring of my online activities and of this site for 2025, I currently can’t really afford to keep that infrastructure running — especially seeing how little it is used. Secondly, I have lately become more and more convinced that the IndieWeb approach is the direction I want to be going in with my digital life. I am not sure it is the most viable of directions for everyone, or that it will lead to more people finding and reading this blog, but I feel like it fits my own personality the most.

Years ago, had been inspired by my valued online friend Евгений Кузнецов² and his way of implementing webmentions on his Hugo blog to look into how to do this on my own site. That project quickly disappeared down the back of my to do list, but I’ve now finally managed to get it accomplished. I’ve started by reading this excellent blog post by Ana Ulin and then setting up an endpoint for my site at Webmention.io. Once I was ready to receive webmentions, I integrated the webmention.js library into my site — this loads some JavaScript locally in your browser when you visit my blog and makes it possible for you to see relevant webmentions on my site. I am indebted to this blog post by Jessica Smith (and especially the CSS source code of that site), which helped me figure out how to configure webmention.js to show my mentions in a format that I like.

The webmentions themselves are stored on the servers at Webmention.io which, as Евгений points out, is pretty handy for me due to the current privacy laws around here. I intend to follow his approach of creating local backups of that content with the command-line tool he wrote for this purpose.

To test my implementation, I used this test from Webmention Rocks and the tool commentpara.de. The former service is purely for testing purposes, the latter allows users to leave comments on webmention-enabled sites without running their own software. I also tested mentioning one of my own posts from another post that links to it with the service webmention.app. ³

As far as outgoing webmentions are concerned, I will handle these manually for now. Probably just by running curl on the command-line:

# Discover webmention endpoint for the page you want to mention
curl -i -s $target | grep 'rel="webmention"'
# Send the URL of your content to the page you want to mention,
# using the endpoint you discovered in step 1
curl -i -d "source=$your_url&target=$target_url" $targets_webmention_endpoint

Of course, I could also use the aforementioned webmention.app to do this manually via the web. Maybe I’ll even automate the process in the future. Since I use Netlify to host this site, I can probably do this quite easily with this extension for their platform. ⁴

For now, however, I hope that you don’t miss the forum too terribly and that you’ll enjoy the new webmention features on the site. Onwards to a brighter IndieWeb future!