Webmentions yes, JavaScript no

Note: Since writing the original post here, I have decided to revert to a non-webmentions approach; however, I will leave this here for the sake of anyone who may find it useful.

I tried yesterday to get my website back on the IndieWeb with at least some form of webmentions. However, within a few hours, it became clear that the third-party JavaScript code I’d used in 2020 wasn’t going to cut it now, for reasons which remain unclear at this writing. Accordingly, I resigned myself to having to dope out what changes I’d have to make in the borrowed code; and, while I worked on that, I reverted the site to its previous, non-webmentions form.

In the interim, I found myself pondering why every webmentions-on-Hugo solution I’d ever found up to now used JavaScript, rather than trying to do it purely in Hugo. After all, Hugo sports plenty of data-grabbing horsepower. For example: in my own experience to date, I’ve found Hugo's getJSON feature just as useful as the node-fetch on which the aforementioned JS relied to grab data from webmention.io.

In a short time, I’d ditched the idea of patching up the 2020 solution and, instead, started building a completely new one of my own which would use getJSON to work with the webmention.io API.¹

Thus, after spending a long night and most of this day figuring it out, I present to you what I originally thought could be the world’s only Hugo-based site which displays webmentions without requiring a single line of JavaScript, although I later learned otherwise from fellow Hugo user Kaushal Modi. Also, I will confess to some pleasure in getting to trash all those node_modules folders I’d had to add just yesterday due to the dependencies on which the earlier, JS-based method relied. I’m no JS-hating purist but, hey, when you don’t need all the extra weight, why keep it in the repo?

When I have the code somewhat DRY-er, I’ll write about it.² In the meantime, I’ve left the following comment within the webmentions-rx (formerly webmentions-pipes) partial template I’m using to suck all this into each applicable post, just in case the curious happen to find that partial on the site repo:

{{/*
  Apologies for the ugliness of the following.
  First, I'll make it work; then I'll **try**,
  at least within the limits of Go and Hugo,
  to make it a bit DRY-er at the very least.
  Fortunately, both Go and Hugo are so fast,
  I don't pay a (real) penalty for this spaghetti.
  But I **do** want to do better. Trust me, friends.
  And, yes, there are some unused vars in here.
  Some are for testing only; some are yet to be used.
*/}}

For now, I’ll just feel fortunate if I don’t end up being the subject of one of those Jurassic Park memes about being so preoccupied with whether I could do this, I failed to consider whether I should—but, truth be known, right now I do feel pretty good about it all. Any time I can get Hugo’s funky templating to do something a little out of the ordinary, I consider it a victory. I can only hope it doesn’t end up being the Pyrrhic kind.

Oh, and if you do happen to check out that code in my repo: I repeat that it’s very much a work in progress, and request that you not judge it too harshly.

1. It would be funny if certain guys from my final workplace—who, three years ago, laboriously helped me through my first-ever attempts at using JS to extract data from remote sites—should happen to read this. I just hope they’re not eating or drinking anything when they do; I’d hate to be responsible for a choking incident or, at the very least, a splattered phone screen. ↩

2. Although the code still needs work, I did write an explainer post about it. ↩