I’ve spent the better part of two days setting up a “The Unofficial Micro.blog Webring”, troubleshooting as to why my browsers blocked the ring code on my Hugo blog but let it pass on my WordPress blog, researching and looking for alternatives.  All for nothing.

A webring is pretty worthless if all the browsers are going to block the ring code from loading.  They didn’t block it on WordPress but they did block it on my Hugo based Micro.blog hosted site.  Whatever.

It appears, that the newest browsers do not like ring codes, even HTML ones, that mix http and https links within the code.  Webringo, the only working web ring host left, is http, you know, the way the web originally was.  My site is https because People That Know and Google say it’s important and what Google wants Google gets.  Anyway, you can’t mix these two protocols in the same code because the browsers get all puckered up.

Okay, so Webringo is out.  Webring.org is also http and looks like it’s on life support.  Ringsurf looks like SEO’s took it over.  So what does that leave?

Modern if You are a Coder

There are people coding their own webrings.  Most of these are JavaScript or Ruby on Rails type of things.  Github is full of them, but these are one off’s meaning you fork the code, get it installed somehow, customize it all just to run ONE webring.  That’s all fine and dandy if you are a web developer or a coder, but it’s all Greek to the masses.

Some people have made webrings on Glitch.  Whatever the f–k Glitch is.

The best of these newfangled webrings or at least the one that caught my eye a few weeks is A Webring Kit by Max Bock.  Max was nice enough to produce something, forkable, that others could use to set up a ring of their own.  And indeed, I think he made it easier to duplicate than others.  But frankly, it still sounds too complicated for me to attempt. But others with more skill than I have might want to look into it.

Old School but Risky

Another way is via a WordPress plugin: Draupnir Ringmanager.  It works.  I’ve seen it working because Greg McVerry got it to work.  The problem is the plugin has not been updated in 5 years and has not been tested with the last 3 major updates of WordPress.  Here at Indieseek.xyz Ive got an expensive directory script attached to WordPress so I just can’t justify the risk to this installation for the sake of one webring.

So here we sit.

1. There is some demand for web rings among bloggers, retro ’90’s webmasters, independent web types and some coders.
2. There are no truly usable web ring hosts left.
3. What is being built are mostly one off type code suitable for only running one ring if you know how to install the code to run it.

So the webring revival for the masses is stalled because of lack of infrastructure.  The train ain’t coming and here we sit.  Sorry Micro.blog members, I tried.

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