I’ve seen many blog webrings in the few years i’ve been blogging, i’ve seen some great ones that are connected to some form of community. And i’ve seen some done quite nicely, and some are just beyond the concept of a webring, though they started as one.

You know, you just need something unique, something uniquely geeky, that way you know it was created by geeks for geeks!

I don’t think it should be too difficult to implement anyhow.

There are many resusable .NET components out there that can be made use of. RSS.NET for one, the sample in the link provided in my previous comment. I’m sure there are a lot of other free bits and pieces out there that can be made use of.

And there I was in the car on the way home thinking “OK, we could crawl the sites once in a while to make sure they’re active, but apart from that we just need a site owner, an email and a random web link page”

All that needs to be done is to customize it a bit and extend it a bit.

The core of it is already done, so that’s the good news.

Because what I’d like to see is the main hub page displaying the recently updated blogs, perhaps an extract of a few words, and the blog post title, the blog post url.

However, looking at the sample, I don’t like the fact that it uses a web user control to contain the “web ring user interface”. I’d rather that be some html code so that it may be placed on every type of server, as some servers don’t allow for 1) ASP.NET or 2) File uploads.

But again, it is a starting point.

Perhaps 3 urls:
http://geekring.com.au/forward.aspx?uid=1
http://geekring.com.au/backward.aspx?uid=1
http://geekring.com.au/random.aspx?uid=1

Having the uid will tell the server where it came from, so the server can then decide where to take the user to next. uid also acts to ensure the user isn’t taken back to where they just left.

Including it as above, in my opinion allows more users to signup, as opposed to the usage of the web user control.

Tristan: Sure, if Frank’s too busy, then I can try whip something up.

All the thing needs to do is accept two URLs, one for the website, the other for the RSS.

That’s the first thing, then second would be to have the ability to “spit out” an OPML of the RSS feeds. Yes, RSS is important

After a User registers, they need to have their website “authorised”, this way to disallow the bogus websites (eg: spam sites, etc…). Yeah this process will be manual, but I think it is better to tread carefully rather than be knee deep in spam later down the track.

And after the validation, a templated email is sent through to the user.

The email will contain the information for them to paste onto their own websites to show their status as being a member of the webring.

This will have 4 links. 3 of which are in text, and the other an image link. There should be a previous (browse to the previous blog in the ring), random (browse to a random blog in the ring) and forward (browse to the next blog in the ring).

And finally, the image link should be a logo for the ring. This logo should point to the webrings’ main website.

I think that’s it for now!

Back in September, I posted about possibly a Aussie Geek Web Ring. Fast forward to now, i’ve still got nothing up. But I [...]