Webmention Analytics

I'm a fan of webmentions. I've written about how to use them before, and I'm quite happy with having them on my site.

However, it can get difficult to see what’s going on with them - especially if there’s a lot of “background noise”. Many sites just scrape content from well-known blogs and republish it for SEO juice. If that content includes a link to your site, it can lead to webmention spam.

Unlike on social media, you also don’t get notifications or reports about incoming webmentions. You’re just handed a bunch of raw data to use however you like. That’s part of the beauty of the Indieweb though: you can tailor it to whatever suits you best.

I recently started playing around with the data I get from webmention.io to see if it could be displayed in a more meaningful way. The result is a new side project I call:

✨✨✨ Webmention Analytics ✨✨✨
You can see it in action in this demo on my site.

I built this with Eleventy and Netlify, mainly because that’s my favorite tech stack to tinker with. But for analytics that don’t have to be real-time, static site generators are actually a really good fit.

Expensive computations like parsing and analyzing 8000+ data points like this can be run once a day through a periodic build hook. The reports it generates are then instantly available to the user, while still being up-to-date enough.

# Features

• group webmention data by month
• overview of webmentions by type (like, reply, repost, mention, bookmark…) and day
• show top source URLs sending webmentions to your site
• show top target URLs on your site receiving webmentions
• show top tweets generating webmentions through brid.gy
• check incoming webmentions against a blocklist of known “content scrapers” and spam domains
• automatic daily updates with cron job

# Get your own instance!

If you also use webmention.io to show webmentions on your site, you can fork the code on Github and make your own instance of webmention-analytics. Just follow the instructions in the README to get started.