Retroactive Webmentioning

By way of testing out my Webmention module for Drupal, I took the 256 posts I’ve written here this year, ferreted out all the external links, discovered their Webmention endpoints, and sent a Webmention.

Those 256 posts contained 840 links in total; of those links, 149 were to a target that supported Webmention.

This seemed like a lot until I realized that I link to myself a lot–to posts written earlier–and as my site supports incoming Webmentions, those get counted; of the 149 eligible targets, 105 were here on ruk.ca and 44 were on other websites.

Of those 44 targets supporting Webmention, the site-by-site breakdown is this:

• Ton Zijlstra: 26
• Frank Meeuwsen: 4
• IndieWeb.org: 4
• Webmention.io: 4
• Steven Garrity: 2
• Brad Enslen: 1
• Olle Jonsson: 1
• Aaron Parecki: 1
• Sven Knebel: 1

Of those 44 targets, the HTTP status code sent back in response to the Webmention was:

• 200 - 19
• 201 - 9
• 202 - 5
• 400 - 11

The 200, 201 and 202 response codes are variations of “ok, we got it,” meaning a total of 33 Webmentions, or 75%, were successful.

Those 11 attempts that returned a 400 (error) were for two reasons:

• 9 returned “Target is not a valid post” - these were instances where I’d link to a home page, or a taxonomy page, or an about page, rather than a post.
• 1 was a malformed link, which was my fault
• 1 returned “Pings are disabled for this post.”

Discovering that I refer back to earlier posts as often as I do makes me wish I had a way of visualizing the interconnections between my posts; now that I have the building blocks for this, I’ll see what I can do about this.