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I tried yesterday to get this site 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.
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. ↩︎
Although the code still needs work, I did write an explainer post about it. ↩︎