I’ve added a webring (via openring-rs) to this blog.
For those of you who remember the webring in the older days of the internet, openring is a simpler take at webrings.
For those that don’t remember, webrings were pretty fun. They were nice, curated “rings” of sites. Each site could include a footer with articles or links to other sites in the ring, such that if you happened upon a site you really liked, you could find a nice curated set of sites similar to it. It was a great way to find a fun rabbit hole.
While many of those webrings used to have moderators and whatnot, openring just lets the user moderate a little webring themselves by adding a list of URLs to RSS/Atom feeds from sites they like, and generate a footer they can include to link to recent posts on those other sites they enjoy (like the one you’ll see at the bottom of this post).
Since openring was originally released by Drew DeVault (and met with a lot of discussion on HN), many people have adopted it in their blogs, which has been fun to see.
Some examples include Jeff Kaufman, Adam Simpson, Andrew Conlin, Brad Taunt, Dimitri Bohlender, Huy Ngo, Thedro Neely, and Eric Garcia.
Seeing that the original Go implementation was pretty short, I decided to make a port of it in Rust that does things a little faster by fetching feeds concurrently; a little more politely by respecting throttling and sending conditional requests; and a little more fairly by allowing users to weight feeds.
Some examples of people using openring-rs include Maureen Daum, Ian Wagner, Bhavani Shankar, and Soc Virnyl Estela.
Come join the fun, add a webring to your blog!