Blog

The upcoming major release of the IndieConnector plugin is progressing very well. Receiving webmentions without webmention.io is already functional, and today I was able to work on the Mastodon integration.

This post is the thousandth post. Then again, that's a lie. But then again, it's not.

Of course, it's a bit silly to write that this is the thousandth post. Because it's not true. There probably are many more, perhaps fewer. It's complicated.

The reason is that many posts are no longer available, but a few can still be found in the web archive. Additionally, there’s the fact that I have an archive of the elbrauschen podcast available online here, which does not belong to this website.

It's a mess, but that doesn't matter. As I already wrote here, I think it's good to define milestones. It's a nice way to pat yourself on the back.

In my Kirby panel, I have a line of statistics. Many of them are slightly frustrating, yet I like to keep an eye on them. One of these metrics shows the number of published posts. And as soon as I publish this post here, a 1,000 will be visible there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJvczRkQHK0

With this Kirby plugin, you can prevent AI crawlers from visiting your own site.

Dark Visitors are all the AI crawlers that roam our websites, scraping text, graphics, and more to train language models and similar technologies. Not everyone likes that. That's why darkvisitors.com was created, a site that lists common user agents used by these crawlers.

There is a lot of stuff happening with the IndieConnector plugin, this is what's going on right now.

I have been working on the new major release of the IndieConnector plugin for quite some time now. The goal is to become independent from webmention.io and be able to receive and handle webmentions without relying on it.

Don't get me wrong, webmention.io is great, and I am happy it's there, and I am able to use it. But users always reach out to me because they struggle to set it up. The goal with my plugins always is that they should simply work. I want them to work with minimal effort on the user's side. Of course, there will always be things that have to be configured, but the plugin's core functionality should, in my humble opinion, work with a minimal set of configurations to be made.

So the next step for IndieConnector is "native" webmentions. Which means that you install the plugin, add an endpoint to your HTML head, and then everything works. If you want to do more, use webmention.io, fine-tune settings, etc., you can do that, but you don't have to.

Also, I want the plugin to be independent, at least regarding its core feature, which currently is webmentions. If webmention.io — I hope it won't — at some point in the future has to shut down, I don't want IndieConnector to become useless.