July was a busy month with lots of new features and changes.

 

 

Stumblizer –  In July I cobbled together a random website finder, sorta like the old StumbleUpon.  This has turned out to be surprisingly popular.  There must be a lot of bored people out there.  I keep adding a few new websites to the Stumblizer index when I find something that fits with the theme.

 

Directory Stumble – This is another random site finder like Stumblizer (above) only filled with different types of directories.  It would appear that not everyone is as enamored of directories as I am since it gets almost no use. *sigh*  It was an experiment and just never took off.  But it is unique.  Still, I’ll keep it up because, you never know, somebody, someday, might enjoy it.

 

Retroweb Ring –  Our new webring has gotten steady interest and I invite you to join.

 

Webmaster Page –  I added a page listing various free things and guides we have for webmasters.

 

Changed Weblogs Category –  Weblogs was always the category for personal blogs so it made sense to move it from under Internet to being under Personal Pages.  Like this: Personal Pages > Weblogs.

 

Made a button – W00t.  I made a button for Indieseek.  You can see it on our Link to Us page.  It’s not fancy but it’s a button.  I used Sadgrl’s Button Maker and the excellent Online Converter to convert the image from png to gif.

 

 

Added a bunch of directories.

 

We got listed in – Smooth Sailings Listings , List-Me and Link Lane Listings.  These directories may be small but are well established and have already sent traffic.

 

Turned off Comments on individual Link Listings – only one or two people have ever left comments besides me since we started in 2018 so best to turn them off.

 

That’s the roundup for July.

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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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Today, this site joined Hotline Webring.

Hotline is a new style webring so you don’t have to do a lot of registration to join.  In fact, this is one of the easiest webrings to join – you only have to do 2.5 simple steps and it just works.  The webring code is straight HTML which you create, just follow the instructions.  This is nice because the ring code does not take up much space.  I have no idea how it’s coded but that hardly matters because it just works.

There is no subject theme for the webring but it mostly appears to be made up of personal blogs, websites and some cool retro Web 1.0 type sites.  You will find a list of all sites in the ring at the link above, so you get an idea of who you are hanging out with.

It’s young, it’s fresh, it’s got a pink background.  Why wouldn’t you check it out?

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Bookmarked

Bookmark: A Webring Kit | Max Bock

This lets you set up, and manage your own webring on Github.  I presume you need to be a Github member to do this and know about things like pull requests (which I don’t).  Points to creator Max Bock for innovation on figuring this out.

I added this to the directory in Webrings.

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