7 ms·
You need a webring
- bobbytheblkbear 3mo ago[flagged]
- amenghra 3mo agoUsing a Cloudflare Worker to implement a web 0.9 feature
- hahahaa 3mo agoYeah seems overkill. Back in the day (1990s) you'd use a serverless script in the "Personal HomePage" language. These days you could do this in client side JS, mayhe fetch the static list from a Gitgub blob or one of the sites in the group.
- loloquwowndueo 3mo agoPardon, how do you do a serverless php page?
- hahahaa 3mo agoWell, shared hosts let you upload the PHP file via FTP (or secure FTP if lucky!) to ~/public_html and serve it without administering a server.
- loloquwowndueo 3mo agoThat’s still running on a server. (Sorry, I guess “serverless” is not a buzzword I’ll ever understand)
- willmartian 3mo agoServerless is just a server that has been abstracted away enough by magical APIs to let you (partially) ignore the underlying physical machines.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- hahahaa 3mo agoYeah I was being tounge in cheek calling a PHP script serverless because technically it is (no need to install stuff and configure a server) but it predates the hype days. Like calling a word doc "nosql"
- hoppp 3mo agoWhy not. It's easy.
- max8539 3mo agoThis should be just a static page… Cloudflare pages are perfect for this. All updating could be done in the repo by special scripts from MD or some other files.
- shruubi 3mo ago> n+0 friends Does this still hold if n=0?
- hahahaa 3mo agoAnother option is a Wander: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47422759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47422759
- lwhsiao 3mo agoI prefer opening: https://github.com/lukehsiao/openring-rs https://github.com/lukehsiao/openring-rs The main idea being that you don't actually need to coordinate a real ring of links to easily link to posts on other blogs that you like.
- galaxyLogic 3mo agoNot sure I get it. Why a "ring"? Why not just have a list of web-site URLs on a page and share that page with your friends and ask them to put that page somewhere on their site? "Ring" means you are navigating linearly and circularly. Isn't it better to provide a list of links so users can choose where they want to go "next"? And why should I have to go around the whole "ring" to get back to where I started from? The Web is based on hyperlinks, not "hyper-rings".
- q3k 3mo agoKids these days...
- embedding-shape 3mo agoIt doesn't neccessarly have to be such a "ring" that you navigate from website #1 to website #2 and the order is always the same, and you cannot jump, or even do random browsing. I think initially the idea was mainly around the "ring" concept, but relatively quickly lots of different implementations did lots of different things, and we still called those "webrings" even though many weren't conceptually "rings" at all, more like "lists of websites that are kind of somewhat about the same thing, sometimes". There was typically a "Random" button/link too, and index, sometimes categories and more. It can be a list of websites, with random order, the main point is people's websites linking to other people's websites, in some way, that it could eventually circle back somehow, then you have a webring.
- galaxyLogic 3mo agoSo part of it seems to be working together: I link to your site with the expectation that you link back to mine. Not a bad idea, also letting the site-creators coordinate who focuses on which sub-topic. But are there many examples of this in the real web?
- jimjimjim 3mo agouh, the webring idea is OLD. Not quite "And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge" old but close.
- heikkilevanto 3mo agoAnd you need to stop telling everyone what we need! "You might be interested in this <thing> if you have this and that" sounds so much more reasonable.
- ravetcofx 3mo agoThis is what will keep the web more human as we go forward into AI slop commercial web crap. Hand build your sites, talk about things your passionate about, share stories, art, things you make. And the web-ring connects you too others in the community with things you share similar interests in. This is what the web was for. Not everything needs to be about making money
- embedding-shape 3mo ago> Not everything needs to be about making money I feel like this is what keeps ruining things, in almost any hobby/sector/ecosystem I come across. Initially, as the only people interested in the thing is doing the thing because it's fun and interesting, everything works out great, people helping people because helping people is fun and the thing is fun. After a while, somehow it starts to bring in money for some people, others start to see people earning money and then the money-optimizers eventually arrive, sucking all the fun out of the ecosystem since all they care about is money, money and money, and tons of more money-optimizers arrive after the initial batch made their success, and around we go until it's all commercial slop all over the place that drowns out all the authentic stuff that initially was almost everything in the community. Seemingly non-profit groups with events held in actual venues where you can face-to-face show your disgust towards these people seem to be the only way of having communities that last for decades around a fun and interesting thing, anything online seems to fall victim to the above way too quickly.
- CM30 3mo agoThis is one reason I'm kinda fond of a lot of fan media related communities. Since things like fanfiction, mods and fan games are in legally murky territory, you can't really make money off of them, especially not directly. It's a great deterrent against grifters and optimisers, since you can't sell your work and you can't set up a company to commercialise it, so anyone uninterested in the community or series has no incentive to get involved. Sadly, it's really hard to achieve something similar in most fields, due to the incentive to turn everything into a side hustle.
- TFNA 3mo ago
- ajxs 3mo agoIn case you want a webring, but don't feel like setting up your own server to run it, I run a webring hosting service that you might find useful: https://webri.ng/ https://webri.ng/
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- chopete3 3mo agoThe what and how parts are good but "why webring?" needs to be explained more. If the content is summarized and personalized for the user the search engine is already rendering similar pages.
- rhet0rica 3mo agoThis comment is such an elegant Rorschach test. Bravo.
- efilife 3mo agoWhy? Are you implying his lack of imagination? Or how one can interpret the comment?
- rhet0rica 2mo agoThe two key interpretations are as follows: 1. It follows that all of human authorship is pointless since search engines now actively bury content and impede access to written documents. Long Live The New Flesh. 2. Webrings are obviously an artifact of people who hate AI slop and yearn for the simpler days of the older Web, before search engines were effective. Therefore the remark about generated summaries is powerfully sarcastic, as the twain shall never meet. Moreover, Google is no longer fit for purpose, so webrings are an apposite solution to the empty niche of trustworthy discovery mechanisms. Eat The Rich. Which one the author actually meant depends entirely on their literacy regarding the web revival movement.
- throwaway0665 3mo agoI followed the web ring on the home page and the first person didn't continue the ring (they had no link to next) and the second webring only contained one other site. Pretty disappointing introduction to something I "need".
- forthwall 3mo agoWhich site has no next button? I think some of them hide them put them in menus!
- throwaway0665 3mo agoThanks that helped me find them - my bad.
- deadbabe 3mo agoBack in 2011, Yahoo’s obsession with gaining control of all webrings basically led to their downfall under Marissa Mayer.
- JKCalhoun 3mo agoI have no friends. Anyone else have a nerdy blog they want to ring me in? I'll point to the next one. (engineersneedart.com)
- dr_kretyn 3mo agoAm I missing something? The person advocates for something that they don't use? I likely don't understand the idea behind it because I was expecting to see links to other pages on that page.
- misingnoglic 3mo agoIt's the left and right arrows on the homepage. There's two rings.
- dr_kretyn 3mo agoI see! It's on the home page, close to the top. I recall these next/prev on every page and either in nav or in the footer so completely missed those buttons. Thanks!
- techcode 3mo ago> "By the time Yahoo stopped controlling webring.org in 2001, search engines had become good enough that web rings were no longer as useful." Given how those good (enough) search engines work these days ... I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of the old social/discovery things things (DMOZ and such) start coming back.
- josephernest 3mo agoIn a webring, do you usually always have the same fixed webring neighbours? Back in the days, how did it usually work about this : If your neighbour has only 7 visitor/day but you do have 100/day, can you ask to change and have this other 10000 visitor/day-site as neighbour? As a webring admin, how do you manage these member requests?
- Juliate 2mo agoBack in the days, the webring idea wasn’t driven by popularity groups and metrics but by affinity, from the perspective of authors. A ring was thematic, friends, interest.
- rambambram 3mo agoI recently added Wander to a website of mine (https://www.heyhomepage.com/wander/ https://www.heyhomepage.com/wander/). Before that, I became a proud member of the small Tech Makers webring (at the bottom of https://www.theredpanther.org/ https://www.theredpanther.org/). Even before that, I just implemented a blogroll (or list of shared links, as I prefer to call it) at https://www.heyhomepage.com/?module=timeline&link=1&view=sharedlist https://www.heyhomepage.com/?module=timeline&link=1&view=sha... Maybe your blog is also in it!? I manually picked most of the bookmarks/feeds I follow from HN. The basis of all these rolls, lists and rings are - of course - hyperlinks. RSS and OPML are silently working in the background. I think there's still unfulfilled potential for RSS as a replacement for social media, because the open web is already social media.
- stevenicr 2mo agoI do think many people with websites an visiting websites would enjoy using webrings again. Interesting to see some misconceptions in this comments here, and the graphic at wikipedia showing it as an actual ring of links, but I don't believe that was ever a solid explanation. Sure there was the option to add your website to most webrings, and some had checker settings to see if a recip link existed then plublish and share.. but that was short lived because spammers, and google's change of 'bad neighborhoods hurt you' - then corporate rollup / walls up.. However on many websites it was great to find similar sites and other sites the author had an interest in and wanted to share with friends / visitros.. recip link or not. It was a useful tool for discovery and sharing. Google got so important so fast that people (and even at the software level (starting at you wordpress)) removed blogrolls entirely. Now that it's understood that you can share with the nofollow attribute added to links, I think we will see more people adding blogrolls / webrings and that will naturally lead to more links back, and people appreciating sharing of other places of interest. I started developing a new webrings plugin to make it easier for people to share and get submissions / suggestions, with options for checking for recip links, having a default nofollow link and such. This led me to thinking about other uses for the same data / DB / fields.. and decidedly that the same backend parts can also create 'directory pages' - which are essentially what webrings were just as a footer scrolling widget verses full page per category.. so I added that. Then I realized the same bits are basically waht is needed for creating a directory or associates.. could be other people who meet at a conference, could be people you work with, other companies you've done business with, or other professionals you've bumped into at other job sites / projects.. so I added that and it also is becoming a contact sharing / directory / roledex kind of system. I did one blog post showing part of the functionality that is in the works: https://betterwebgroup.com/from-business-cards-to-digital-directories-how-webring-plus-powers-in-person-events/ https://betterwebgroup.com/from-business-cards-to-digital-di... Right now I'm working through the backend being difficult to chose what shows up on the front end and under what conditions.. hope to have sorted by end of month - when will hope people will help with testing and suggestions. Trying to make it as standalone react system that can work into any website and a wordpress plugin at the same time has led to so challenges.. but it's getting close.