Once I had a minimum viable blog up and running, I knew I wanted to get some indieweb love on it, in the form of webmentions. I’ve mostly ever only posted on Twitter prior to now:

So getting Tweet replies and likes was a must. I created a webmention.io account - the jay.gooby.org website already had my email address on it, so I just added a rel="me authn"attribute to the link: <a href="mailto:jay@gooby.org" rel="me authn">jay@gooby.org</a> which then let me login to webmention.io. And then from their dashboard, I grabbed the <link rel="webmention"> and <link rel="pingback"> links it created, added these to my jekyll header, and published the site.

Next, to get started ingesting Tweets, make sure your Twitter profile has a link to the website you’ll be showing the Tweets and likes on, then sign in with Twitter to brid.gy. This creates an account for you, and will start polling Twitter for tweets and likes that link to your website.

Finally, you need to show these webmentions on your website. I stole pretty whole-heartedly from Matt Hobbs via his Implementing Webmentions on this blog post. All I really did, was drop the Cloudinary functionality and add a small bit of styling to my Jekyll theme to support the webmentions, including a nice pure-css animated loader from loading.io/css.