I built a tool to help me participate in the IndieWeb. It’s called RabbitEars.

It’s a simple tool that lets me submit webmentions (links in my blog posts that mention other sites) from my site to other sites. Many websites will have some form that you can submit a webmention to, which is great, but I wanted to make it easier than that, so I built RabbitEars.

RabitEars will discover feeds on your site, discover the webmentions on those feeds, and then submit them to other sites.

Webmentions are a core part of the IndieWeb, but they can be a pain to manage. If you are familiar with trackbacks, they are the modern day equivalent. The idea is, if you link to another site, you can let them know about it by submitting a webmention to their site. Their site will be configured to receive webmentions and then it can use them as it sees fit. Receiving webmentions is a little complicated, but webmention.io makes it really easy.

Authenication is handled via IndieAuth, so you can use any IndieAuth provider you want. I use IndieAuth.com. It’s a simple and easy way to add authentication to your site. You only need a domain name and you can sign in and get started with RabbitEars.

I built RabbitEars with Ruby on Rails and Stimulus, my preferred stack for building web apps.