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What is Webmention? What can I build on top of the Webmention protocol? How do I start sending and receiving Webmentions? These are three questions I'm going to answer in my upcoming talk on Codementor Events: Decentralized Website Communication with Webmention.

Earlier today, I was playing around with OpenAI's new ChatGPT model. I have thus far asked ChatGPT what coffee is, how to boil a kettle, what microformats is, and what the IndieWeb is. I thought I'd share the result I got for the prompt "What is the IndieWeb?":

Last week, I visited the US for the first time. I travelled to New Orleans. After two connecting flights from Scotland and almost a full day of travel, I arrived greeted by warmth, despite the late hour. I couldn't believe how warm the weather was. I took a few photos on the trip that I want to share here on my blog.

Webmentions enable distributed social interactions over the web. Using webmentions, you can send replies, likes, and other interactions that were published on your site to respond to another web page. For example, I send Webmentions for all of the bookmarks I create on my website. If a site can receive Webmentions, they will be notified that I bookmarked their post for later.

I love how Wikipedia shows you a preview of a page when you hover over a link to another page in a wiki entry. This makes Wikipedia more navigable for me, particularly if I am only looking for a definition of a term (text that appears in the preview) to help me better understand the contents on a page. This got me thinking about adding a hover feature to my website that would show you a preview of links that appear in my blog posts.

The goal of IndieWeb Utils is to make it easier for you to add IndieWeb features to your application in Python. In v0.3.0, released earlier this week, we added a lot of new features to the library. But, there were some features that were almost ready that did not make their way into the release. Today, we are releasing those features as part of v0.4.0, in addition to a few minor bug fixes that I discovered since the launch of the last version.

I like when websites provide direct links to headings on the page. In Mozilla Developer Network documentation, headings are clickable. When clicked, the URL of the page changes to include a hashtag (#) at the end. This hashtag corresponds to the HTML ID of the heading on a page. When you visit the URL directly, the page loads then moves you to the heading you clicked on.

I am excited to announce that IndieWeb Utils is now in v0.3.1. This update is the culmination of months of work from project contributors. Before I get any further, I want to note a special thank you to James, Tantek and Angelo for their collaboration in this project. Their contributions, code reviews, and suggestions have greatly enhanced this library.

I have worked on numerous projects that involve finding all of the URLs in the sitemaps associated with a website. For example, one of the first steps the IndieWeb Search crawler takes when it starts crawling a website is to find all of the URLs in all of the sitemaps. Separately, I have written scripts that validate the status codes of all the URLs in a sitemap.

Organisers at the W3C are working on various initiatives related to sustainability. Over the last few months, two new community groups (CGs) were started to focus on sustainability and how it pertains to the web and the W3C as an organisation. [^1] After doing some reading about the revived Sustainable Web (sustyweb) group, I decided to join and see how I could help.