Recently, both I and a friend of mine (James) have dove back into making our blogs better. I don’t have a whole lot of graphical changes to show for mine, so his is much more impressive. When he showed it off in the Discord we share with the rest of our CMU friends, it garnered a lot of attention, and one thing led to another, and suddenly the talk about “wouldn’t it be neat if we were all in a webring together?” turned into me having a domain name in my cart & plans to write the darn thing from scratch the next morning.

https://cmuwebr.ing/ is the result. I’m pretty proud of it; took 2:30hr from “ok let’s bang this thing out” to “website is live & ready to have sites added to it”. I read some other webring implementations before trying this, but chose not to use any because it really is too darn simple to not just write your own that you fully control, imo. There is a file https://cmuwebr.ing/static/sites.json that the server (written in Python using Sanic) reads, and each site on the ring indexes into it w/ their ID, and the server takes care of redirecting the prev/next links. I also plan on writing a Javascript snippet that will parse said JSON & replace the links on the page so redirects don’t have to go thru my server, but that’s for later.

As the founder of the webring, of course I’m already on it! You can see it at the bottom of every page. I think this is a very good use of the footer space; I do want to encourage more “low-tech” ways of socializing and discovery on the internet. RSS feeds, webrings, emails, it’s like I’ve travelled back to the 90s!! Not to be all RETVRN (HTML is way better than it was back then) but yeah I enjoy this a lot more.

If you’re a CMU friend & want to join the webring, view the instructions on GitHub. Or send me an email! If you’re not a robot I’m sure you can find where…