This is a webring, built using Jekyll, hosted by GitHub Pages, that adds sites via pull requests.
The choice to make it a static site generated by GitHub Pages was based on the following:
- Contributing content is pretty well solved by GitHub pull requests.
- Merge conflicts are avoided by making each site represented by a separate file, rather than a list where multiple PRs might be appending to the same spot at the top or bottom.
- GitHub Pages hosts the webring content.
- GitHub Pages rebuilds on merge.
It wasn't intended, but a pleasant side effect of making unique embed pages for each member site is that the next/previous links are computed at build time, and neither server rendering nor JavaScript are needed for it to function. JavaScript is only need for:
- picking a destination for the
randomlink - resizing the iframe (through help of a
parent.jsfile), thought that is not needed if the host site styles the iframe correctly - overriding the interior styles of the embed iframe with the optional
?stylesheet=<some url>query param
I don't, but neither do I let random scripts from unknown origins run in my browser until I specifically whitelist them. They're dangerous as all heck, so it's important to me that 95% of this works without needing it.
Full instructions are available on the prototype's about page, but the gist is:
<iframe src="https://toomanybees.github.io/ring/sites/toomanybees">
</iframe>
<script src="https://toomanybees.github.io/ring/assets/parent.js"></script>where toomanybees is the name of the member site that's hosting this embed (it corresponds to the file in _websites), and the host is the GitHub Pages host location.
When basing a new webring on this codebase, these are the most notable files to update:
_config.yml: the Jekyll configuration_layouts/site_html.html: the markup template for the embedsassets/embed.css: the stylesheet for the embeds_websites: the folder where site descriptor files reside