Skip to main content

mastodon - Link to source

Webmentions: how I used 1990s technology to avoid writing JavaScript.

> When I started building websites over 20 years ago, I used Perl and CGI to run simple scripts, like a guestbook (I wrote my own). I prefer Ruby these days—and Perl has deprecated CGI—but could that approach still work? I thought it would be fun to try. It turns out it does work!

Please like/boost/reply to help me load test! 😁

joshuawood.net/webmentions

#Blog #IndieWeb #Webmentions #Jekyll #Ruby #Perl #CGI


Webmentions

Have you heard of webmentions? They’re similar to pingbacks—but modern—and allow websites to notify each other about different types of activity (like replies on social media). As of 2017, the protocol is a W3C recommendation.
Joshua Wood
#perl #blog #ruby #indieweb #cgi #webmentions #jekyll
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Joshua Wood

Mark Gardner
mastodon - Link to source
Mark Gardner
• •

Two questions and a comment:

1) You avoid a 3rd-party service like #Netlify because you "want [your] #blog to run forever,” but then use the Webmention.io #SaaS?

2) Did you use the classic #Perl #CGI module? You might enjoy the simpler and faster CGI::Tny instead. Here's a comparison: metacpan.org/pod/CGI::Tiny#COM…

Comment: A lot of Perl is “legacy," but new #WebDev projects typically use #PSGI. An article on lifting to a modern framework: metacpan.org/pod/CGI::Alternat…

CGI::Tiny

Common Gateway Interface, with no frills
metacpan.org
#perl #blog #webdev #cgi #psgi #saas #netlify
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Mark Gardner

Joshua Wood
mastodon - Link to source
Joshua Wood
• •

@mjgardner wow, thanks for the suggestions. I'll dig into these. Yes, I'm using the CGI module with mod_cgid in Apache.

You're right about Webmention.io—it's not an ideal dependency. I decided to accept this tradeoff because I had limited time and didn't want to build directly on the protocol. My requirement of not using a 3rd-party provider of "serverless functions" is still satisfied, in any case, and if Webmention.io goes away, I can take the time to support the protocol directly.

@Mark Gardner
⇧