WebLink - Webring Manager

A simple script for managing a web ring in a peer-to-peer fashion.

This is a very early version of the script and lots of work still needs to be done.

Demo (YouTube)

Setup

Clone the repository and run the script to configure a node

Setting a masternode URL will retrieve an initial site list from the host making it easy for anyone to join the webring and retrieve a current list of members.

Copy the webring.json file to your webserver at the path designated during node configuration

You will be asked to configure a path for the location of webring.json. Omitting a path will assume webring.json is located at the root of the webserver

Have a member of the webring add you as a peer for your list to sync with other webring members

Usage

python webring.py - Will initialize the webring and allow you to configure a node. If a node is already configured it will simply dump the contents of webring.json

Commands

addpeer - Adds a node to the site list (peers will need to be manually synced after addition at this time)

syncpeer [url (optional)] - Syncs data with all nodes in the sites list. Specifying the url path of a node where webring.json is located will sync site data for that specific node.

addsite - Create an entry in the sites list for a website that is not configured as a WebLink node

Banner images for external sites require that you download the banner in a location that the script can access. The image file will be encoded as base64 in the sites array so the image files can be removed once they've been added.

Webring HTML Page

The webring.html file will load content from the webring.json file. The banner image size is currently set to 240x60. CSS is inline and easily customizable. The javascript code in this file can be used to create custom pages.

Example JSON Data

{
    "node": 
      {
        "title": "example",
        "url": "example.com",
        "ring_url": "example.com",
        "avatarb64": "garble==",
        "gpg": "public_key",
        "master_node_url": "peer.example.com/webring",
        "blacklist": []
      },
    "sites": [
      {
        "title": "peer",
        "url": "peer.example.com",
        "ring_url": "peer.example.com/webring",
        "avatarb64": "garble==",
        "gpg": "public_key"
      },
      {
        "title": "external site",
        "url": "ext.example.com",
        "ring_url": "None",
        "avatarb64": "garble==",
        "gpg": "public_key"
      }
    ]
  }

To Do

• Implement site blacklsting
• PGP/GPG integrity checking
• Implement site banners/avatars
• Webring page generation
• Peer and site removal
• Administrative web interface
• Support for different languages to make it easier to update data directly from webserver
• Daemon that checks for events across the webring such as site additions, removal, and peer connections
• Possibly support scraping of popular webrings to allow for easy import of existing data