I just introduced a new feature on the website! 🎉
As usual, whenever content is POSSEd (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), you will find links to the syndicated content at the bottom of the page.
Now, you will also see a small link to “toggle the interaction crawler”. This will open (or hide) a small form, where you can select available (and supported) social media platforms to crawl for interaction counts.
This is in line with what I was discussing a few weeks ago about webmentions, and why I am not using that protocol at the moment.
The platforms I am currently supporting are BlueSky, Hacker-News, and Mastodon. This is possible as they have public APIs that do not require authentication to send requests to. 😸
I can’t support Twitter/X, because its API requires authentication. 😿
Triggering the public API requests is subordinate to the user agreeing to this, as I have put a strict “no-third-party-requests” policy in place on this website (unless there is an agreement otherwise).
The code generating the requests is available in the inter-pull repository, on GitHub. I will probably develop it a bit more to support pulling more content, and add some examples on how to use the functions and display the responses.
So, stay tuned for the next update!