This sounds like a fun idea, and I’m happy to participate (though I would prefer not to be involved in maintaining it).
I think your preferred solution sounds right; though probably it would be better to link to webring.haskell.org/next?from=example.org rather than relying on the Referrer header (often disabled due to privacy concerns).
Somewhat related is the older http://planet.haskell.org/ which doesn’t look it’s being maintained…
It is certainly still used, however! At least by me.
To me, a planet (also nice 2000th tech) seems to be a more form for a curated list of Haskell related blogs.
I had never heard of planet.haskell.org – what a great finding!
Indeed, perhaps a planet is all we need.
I’d just say webrings have the advantage of making the webring itself known, because it is linked to from every member’s blog, whereas the planet points outwards to blogs, but rarely seems to be pointed into by them – to know about the planet you need to discover it exactly.
Funnily, I had thought of making this planet-kind-of-site to aggregate blog feeds a few times now.
Great to know it already exists (and that the tech has a cool name 
).
I’ll reiterate that this is a request for comments (RFC), and that I’m not acting yet on this, just looking to see what the community thinks about it 
and whether we think it would be worth doing and have participants – if you’d join the webring do let me know (and while you’re at it, feel free to post your blogs here too).
In general, I’d be in favor of planet (I discovered a lot of blogs from planet.haskell.org in the past). Webrings, at least in my part of the world, used to be considered spam due to the fact that one blog in the ring could switch topics and it would be quite hard to skip it.
I think it’s also similar to how we no longer have token ring topologies (modulo exceptions), but everything is more hub-and-spoke model.
What is the state of planet.haskell.org? It says
The Planet is currently administered by Amin Bandali.
and it is running just fine. @jaspervdj , why do you think it’s not maintained? Maybe it is still maintained (in a passive-reponsive way), but a generation of Haskeller’s didn’t think of joining it? Did anyone try to join recently?
I will try to, just need to get the content of the post in its RSS description rather than just the description (seems to be one of the requirements).
I’ll report back.
Aside from my minor shock at being noticed, I’d be down to participate in something.
Right now, in addition to planet.haskell.org, the Haskell Weekly Newsletter also serves as an aggregator, but it too points out outward.
Still, I wouldn’t mind connecting to other blogs with something like the proposed solution (server-managed links) - I think it is simple and unobtrusive, and I could easily include it as a header or footer.
I tried to add Haskell Weekly years ago and never heard anything. Perhaps I should interpret that as a rejection, but it seems like a lack of maintenance.
If that turns out to be the case I could imagine taking over running the service. I use it myself and have managed planets in the past (not that it’s hard).
But let’s first see if @romes has success.
As an infrastructure admin I keep stuff up and running, but I don’t monitor the requests to be added. I don’t know if amin remains responsive to them or not, and if not, I would happily hand the responsibility over to someone else.
As a sidenote, the software planet runs is itself outdated, tied to some old versions of python libs and not well maintained. I did a little manual hacking to get it working and handle some unicode bugs last time we migrated, but didn’t do it very responsibly (python hacking is not my specialty). That said, if it is indeed “planet venus” then it looks like it may have acquired some new life and maintainers in the meantime.
Are you saying that this is currently running on haskell.org infrastructure, so a transfer of responsibility does not even require a change in infrastructure? That’s good to hear!
Not only has planet been since inception (well over 10 years ago) on haskell.org infrastructure, in fact, it is currently running on the same box as this discourse instance!
Another good thing about planet-haskell instead of a webring is that if a blog has some posts about haskell but others about Peruvian folk dancing, we can configure planet to only pull the ones with the correct tag.
There are two sides to that coin, however!
If a blog has some posts about Haskell, that’ll be my hook into seeing what else this author writes about – including things exactly like Peruvian folk dancing, which I might learn I find interesting
I’m currently adding feed support (PR#451) to emanote, the tool created by @srid I’m using for my blog. That way I hope to get it on the planet… Though it’s annoying that the planet is not better advertised, and that you need to contact the admin by mail to add a new source.
I’d be happy to join the Haskell Webring. If I understand correctly, I would need to add such banner to my site: <a href="webring.haskell.org/prev">←<a/> Member of the haskell webring <a href="webring.haskell.org/next">→</a>, and the service would use the referrer header to pick the next website?
Thanks @romes for introducing this webring system, it looks interesting
@romes, did you get a response from Amin?
If not, @sclv, may I volunteer to take over maintenance? (Probably just requires adding my SSH key somewhere?)
I haven’t found the time to make my RSS feed include the content of the post yet, unfortunately!
I just asked Amin to add the Haskell Interlude feed to https://planet.haskell.org/ and it got added overnight. So looks like it’s well-maintaned at the moment. @taylorfausak, maybe just try again?
has anybody ever actually started a webring? I think it’s a great idea. I think we wouldn’t even need a software at first, a simple link to the next website would be fine, this should be pretty simple to organize for few people.
How about everybody interested answers with a website that they would like to have partaking, then we figure out an order (lexicographic would be fine, I guess) and just plug in a link? Seems easy!
I’ll go first:
Does nobody care about this idea anymore or do we want to come up with a server for link generation before we start the ring?