I’ve been posting likes to Seblog for a few weeks now. I like the likes, but they al looked like ‘Seb likes this’, so I was like: looks like I like to fix my likes.

Today I hooked up XRay to Seblog, so now my site can see things on URLs I link to. (I actually run a version on a ’secret’ URL, to keep things on my own server.) This way I can grab the name of the post I liked and show that, together with the author. If it has no name, but a photo, it says ‘Seb likes a photo’. It adds the author if it knows who it is. If it really doesn’t know anything about the page, it still defaults to ‘this’. I can fix those manual if I want.

XRay’s format consists of two parts: a data part, with information about the page it looked at, and a refs part, which is a list of URLs that are mentioned or embedded on the page. Retweets, for example, show the original tweet in the refs. I added a refs field to my pages, where I store the data part under the url of the page I mentioned and the refs part under the urls they came with.

An example, with Kirby Data and YAML:

Like-of: http://example.com/a-post

​----

Refs:
  "http://example.com/a-post":
    name: A Post
    author: Someone
    repost-of: http://another-example.com/a-photo
  "http://another-example.com/a-photo":
    photo: http://another-example.com/a-photo/img.jpg
    author: Someone Else

I can be more efficient with the moment I grab the data. For example: to send webmentions, my server already reaches out to all links in the post to find their Webmention Endpoint. If I parse the page then, I don’t need another call from XRay later on.

I also need to fiddle a bit with the things I want to display. But for now it’s okay: my server has the data for my likes. I even download pictures if a post has a photo property. I now not only own my likes, I also have my own archive of the things I like.