🤖✀🌿 Gardening an IndieWeb webring

Are you a member of the 🕸️💍 IndieWeb Webring? Perhaps one of many who have been confused to discover that member sites are not automatically removed when the webring links disappear from their site?

I'm pleased to announce that the webring will now be self-gardening! Webring member sites th-

Hold on, links to what now?

That-... is actually a good question!

In order for webrings to work, member sites have to link to one another, usually through the webring itself.

When you sign in to the 🕸️💍 IndieWeb Webring, you see this prompt on your dashboard page:

These links should be copied and pasted into your site so that they appear on the page that matches your webring sign-in. For example, I sign in with my homepage https://martymcgui.re/, so I put my links to the webring on my homepage. They look like this on my site, but you can style them up to look like anything you want.

The basic deal for most webrings is that, in order to receive incoming traffic from other member sites, you need to also display links back to the webring so a visitor can continue on their journey browsing sites from the webring.

If that's the deal, then when a member site goes offline, or removes the webring links from their page, the webring should no longer direct visitors to that site.

The IndieWeb webring tracks whether a site is "Active" or ... "Not Active" (ahem, Inactive). Active sites can receive traffic from webring visitors and, if you choose, appear on the Directory page. Inactive sites... can't do those things.

As the owner of an webring member site, you can sign in to the webring and your Dashboard page will show your site's current "Active" / "Not Active" status and the results of the most recent attempts to check your site for webring links. If you've made changes to your site, there's a "Check links now!" button on the Dashboard to scan for them again.

Okay that's enough background, I think.

Right, thanks. But actually no, there is more.

Initially, Active status on the webring kiiiiind of worked like an honor system. The first time you successfully sign in, your site is added to the webring and set to Active. From that point on, there were only two ways for your site to get marked as Not Active:

• If you clicked "Check links now!" while your site was offline or didn't have webring links on it.
  
• OR if I ran a "gardener" script that checked the webring links for one or more sites.

Since the webring came online in, um, 2018, I've only received a handful of nudges from folks who have been willing to track me down to the IndieWeb chat and complain. That led me to think this honor system was "okay" or "at least not so bad that folks are willing to jump through hoops to bring it to my attention".

That's definitely enough background.

Agreed!

So what's new?

Well, the honor system days are over! Which should be good for all webring member sites, I think.

I've built a little automated gardener that will periodically check member sites for their links. It's designed in a way that trends towards polling member sites about once per month.

For a new member site, it basically works like this: about an hour after you sign up, your site will be checked for links. If they're there, the gardener will check again the next day. It will check again a few days later, then a week, then two weeks.

Finally, as long as the links are there at every check, the gardener will only check once per month.

What happens if the webring links disappear from my site?

If the gardener finds that an Active member site has gone offline or lost the webring links, the site is marked Not Active. It's checked again the next day, then a few days later, then a week and then two.

Finally, the Not Active site will be checked once per month for 3 months. If the site stays Not Active that whole time, the gardener will stop checking and the site owner will need to sign in to re-check links manually if they want the site to become Active again.

What happens if I put the webring links back on my site?

If the gardener finds that a Not Active member site has their webring links back, the site is marked as Active and the schedule resets. The gardener will then check it the next day, then three days later, then a week, then...

Okay, got it!

Woohoo!

Why now, though?

Oh dang, that's a good question.

I've found the energy and space to start working on the webring again, including some possible projects like those I listed in my last update. Before jumping into any of those, though, I want to feel like I can "trust" that the webring is taking care of itself and its visitors. That means not sending folks to sites where the owner changed their mind about being a webring member or, worse, lost sites, and keeping track of active sites on its own!

Can we see the code?

Sure! The bulk of the updates are here on my git hosting. As with most things webring there's a little bit that's well thought out and some attempts at rigor followed by a rush of throwing things together when it appears near working.

I'm open if folks have suggestio-

Wait, I didn't actually want to look at code!

I put some words in your mouth, there, yeah. Sorry. 🙈

Okay! That's it for now. As always, feel free to reply to this post on your own site, or feel free to drop me a line in the #indieweb chat (I’m schmarty there).