indieweb-utils Posts 📝

As I have been building IndieWeb services, I have found some of the code I have written to be useful across multiple applications. For instance, I wrote logic that initialises and verifies an authentication request using IndieAuth. I copied this same code across my Webmention endpoint, Micropub server, and other tools with minor modifications. The downside to this was that every time I wanted to make a change to that logic, I had to make a change in several places.

Earlier this week I watched Alex Chan's Sans I/O programming talk. In the talk, Alex argues the importance of separating I/O and program logic, with reference to a situation where his team was unable to use already-available parsing libraries for BagIt data because said libraries depended on local access to a file. This talk resonated with me because it made me realise I tend to couple I/O and logic in my code without realising it. I'd highly recommend watching the talk in full, or at least reading Alex's accompanying summary on their blog.

Over the last month, I have been working with James Van Dyne on IndieWeb Utils, the Python library I published toward the end of last year. IndieWeb Utils aims to provide helper functions that are useful when building applications related to the IndieWeb. For instance, the library contains features like a function to send a webmention and a function to generate a reply context from a web page.

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.

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 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.

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.