Openring

Dev tools

static site generator plugin

SHOW HN2019

351points
95comments
#79of 2,195 in 2019
Top 4%of 2019 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

13 positive, 26 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 5 critical, out of 45 comments about the project. Thread score +0.15.

Idea: 10 for, 4 againstExecution: 2 for, 0 againstPerformance: 1 for, 0 againstDocs: 0 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Nostalgic revival of webrings and blogrolls; good for decentralized discovery.

    From 4 comments
    • It allows bloggers that want to keep control over their own platform and content (read: not use Medium) to be part of a bigger network of selfhosted blogs. Like in the good old…
      vbsteven on HN
    • ah, what's old is new again. i can't wait to get my 1999 on! =) the subtitle is a little more informative: "A webring for static site generators." i'm glad to see this kind of…
      clairity on HN
    • Wow this gave me a serious flashback to late 90's websites and all the links to other sites in a network.
      dfischer on HN
    • love it! i always wondered what happened to the good old blogroll
      blondin on HN
  • Useful way to show other blogs on your own site.

    From 2 comments
    • You rig it into your own blog. It's designed for use with static site generators. Check out the links on the bottom of my blog posts:…
      Sir_Cmpwn on HN
    • I liked this, and added it to my site: https://www.jefftk.com/p/openring
      jefftk on HN

Objections

  • Curation and search are unsolved; webrings were poor at quality discovery.

    From 2 comments
    • How does it solve curation & search? Edit: I'm asking because I suspect your answer is going to be "it doesn't/that's not the point/who cares?" But people who read blogs will…
      flunhat on HN
    • I always liked the concept of webrings as a vehicle of discovery, but in practice it was always terrible. Nobody curated what could or could not be part of a ring so you were…
      jammygit on HN
  • May copy other people's content without permission.

    From 1 comment
    • Is it just me, or is this just an automated way to steal other people's content and put it on your blog without their permission? > ...fetch the latest 3 articles from among your…
      masukomi on HN
  • Unclear use case compared to existing RSS readers.

    From 2 comments
    • What's the use case for something like this ? Looks a bit like what any RSS reader would provide. Or maybe it's meant to publish links to other blogs on a separate site, which…
      frenchman99 on HN
    • What's the use case for something like this? Looks like it takes RSS feeds and makes a blogroll. I thought most blogging platforms had that function built-in. Certainly Blogger…
      reaperducer on HN

Requests

  • Pipe feeds from an existing feed reader database into it.

    From 1 comment
    • Very cool! Since I already have my feeds sitting locally in my feed reader's db, it'd be cool if I could just pipe that out to Openring somehow.
      nathcd on HN
  • Make it a Jekyll plugin.

    From 1 comment
    • This should be a Jekyll plugin as well. Maybe when I get time.
      captn3m0 on HN
  • Make crawling and graphing the ring easier via output HTML.

    From 1 comment
    • If this is widely adopted, it would be quite straightforward to crawl and graph a network of all the blogs in the ring. This would be really cool! Search sucks for finding good…
      albertgoeswoof on HN

Questions

  • What is the use case compared to RSS readers?

    From 1 comment
    • What's the use case for something like this ? Looks a bit like what any RSS reader would provide. Or maybe it's meant to publish links to other blogs on a separate site, which…
      frenchman99 on HN
  • How does it solve curation and search?

    From 1 comment
    • How does it solve curation & search? Edit: I'm asking because I suspect your answer is going to be "it doesn't/that's not the point/who cares?" But people who read blogs will…
      flunhat on HN

Alternatives named

  • Tiny Tiny RSS

    From 2 comments
    • I'm quite partial to TinyRSS, available at tt-rss.org.
      dsr_ on HN
    • I'm a lifetime subscriber to Feedly (https://feedly.com) which has behaved sanely since I joined and claims to have mobile apps but I'm not the target audience for reading blogs…
      mdaniel on HN
  • Feedly

    From 1 comment
    • I'm a lifetime subscriber to Feedly (https://feedly.com) which has behaved sanely since I joined and claims to have mobile apps but I'm not the target audience for reading blogs…
      mdaniel on HN
  • Miniflux

    From 1 comment
    • https://miniflux.app - Very minimalistic and written in Go with a hosted and self hosted option.
      dewey on HN
  • FreshRSS

    From 1 comment
    • Self hosted https://freshrss.org/ has been pleasing me for years now. No troubles at all, even when updating. Uses SQLite, which is awesome when migrating. Used…
      unicornporn on HN
  • NewsBlur

    From 1 comment
    • I had used Thunderbird's RSS reader for ages, but last year I needed to work on both machines concurrently, so went looking for an alternative and found newsblur -…
      beagle3 on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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