Webring Starter Kit

A boilerplate to host your own community of sites, also known as a webring. Inspired by posts from Tatiana Mac and Charlie Owen.

Uses Eleventy and Netlify to build a central directory for member sites. People can link to /prev, /random and /next and be redirected to members of the ring.

✏️ Explanatory Blog Post

Features

• Admins manage the ring on Github
• Members are defined in src/data/members.json
• Let people add their site through pull request or submit via email form
• Publish a code of conduct
• Provide an embed code that renders a banner (as a web component)
• Publish an index of all member RSS feeds
• show a SVG map of the ring and its members

Example

See the Demo Site generated by this code.

How to host a ring

1. Fork this repo
2. Edit src/data/meta.json and fill in your community info
3. Add an avatar image for your ring to src/assets/images
4. Remove the demo members in src/data/members.json
5. Deploy your site to Netlify
6. After you've set a domain, enter that in meta.json as well.

Banner Embed

Members can copy a code snippet and embed it into their sites. It renders a web component (with the bare links as a fallback).

The index site will produce an embed code with your ring URL and title:

<webring-banner>
    <p>Member of <a href="{{ your-url }}">{{ your-title }}</a></p>
    <a href="{{ your-url }}/prev">Previous</a>
    <a href="{{ your-url }}/random">Random</a>
    <a href="{{ your-url }}/next">Next</a>
</webring-banner>
<script async src="{{ your-url }}/embed.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

The design is up to the ring admins. It could look something like this:

Local Development

To build the site locally, run these commands:

# clone this repository
git clone git@github.com:maxboeck/webring.git

# go to the working directory
cd webring

# install dependencies
yarn

# start a local build server and the gulp pipeline
yarn start

This repo autodeployes master to netlify.

Other things on Mainframe Club

This website is served from web.mainframe.club. The bare domain hosts my single-member Mastodon instance.