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 kind of a modern 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, 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. Come join the fun, add a webring to your blog!