ring.muhokama.fun is a webring built with YOCaml which produces a static site. The medium-term aim is to create a small community, in homage to the small-web of people with personal digital spaces (blog, wiki, site, galleries) who are used to exchanging information on common platforms. The project is largely (and freely) inspired by webring de Merveilles

Table of Contents

• ring.muhokama.fun
  • Contribute to the content of the webring
    • Join the chain
      • Creating your identity
      • Adding the identity to the chain
      • Linking the webring on your website
    • Area of interest
    • Participation in the federated blog
  • Contribute to the generator
    • Setting up the development environment
  • Run the binary ring.exe
  • Launching tests
  • Project updates
  • Generating documentation locally

If you feel that you have something in common with the members of the ring, you can of course add your personal space to the webring!

The process is fairly straightforward: just create a your-ident.yml file in the data/members/ directory. You can draw inspiration from the members already created, but the minimum data to be supplied are :

id: your-ident
main_link:
  url: your-website-url

Here's a slightly more expansive example that takes advantage of default settings, inspired by my entry in the webring:

id: xvw
display_name: Xavier Van de Woestyne
bio: I'm a Belgian developer living in France (Nantes), very interested
  in statically typed functional programming.
location: France, Nantes
main_link:
  url: https://xvw.lol
  lang: fra
main_feed:
  url: https://xvw.lol/atom.xml
  lang: fra
additional_links:
  - title: X
    url: https://x.com/vdwxv
  - title: Mastodon
    url: https://merveilles.town/xvw
  - title: Github
    url: https://github.com
additional_feeds:
  - title: Journal
    url: https://xvw.lol/journal.xml

For the moment, add-on information is used relatively little (the additional feeds are used to generate the OPML file) but in the near future, it is likely that this data will be used, for example, to build profile pages.

Now that your identity has been created, you need to add it to the chain. To do this, simply add your id to the data/chain.yml file, and you're done! You can refers to Setting up the development environment in order to test locally your addition.

As its aim is to create links between different sites, it's a good idea to add the Webring to your personal site. It's fun to add the Webring to your personal site. When you are added to the Webring (and it is activated). You will have two dedicated links:

• https://ring.muhokama.fun/u/<YOUR-IDENT>/pred which redirects to the previous member of the web ring
• https://ring.muhokama.fun/u/<YOUR-IDENT>/succ which redirects to the next member of the web ring

An example that could be seen on your page would be:

Hey, this site is part of 
<a href="https://ring.muhokama.fun">ring.muhokama.fun!</a><br />
<a href="https://ring.muhokama.fun/u/<YOUR-IDENT>/pred">Previous</a> 
| <a href="https://ring.muhokama.fun/u/<YOUR-IDENT>/succ">Next</a>

But of course you're free to decide how you want it to look!

The webring index displays a (probably non-exhaustive) list of participants' interests. If for some obscure reason you find that references are missing, you can modify the interests section of the data/index.md page.

The federated blog allows you to share articles that are unified by the themes of the webring. Each reference to an article lives in the /data/articles directory and if you are part of the ring, you can add your articles freely. Imported items are referenced in the ring's Atom feed.

The Webring is a project that uses version 2 of YOCaml, a static site generator written in OCaml, which is very flexible and fun.

The project is divided into five parts:

• lib/ contains the library code used to describe the generator. This is where all the webring's logic is to be found. (The library is called Gem (because I have a dubious sense of humour)
• bin/ contains the binary code used to generate the site. It can be invoked using the command dune exec bin/ring.exe --help. The binary simply invokes the logical pipelines described in lib.
• data contains the static data used to build the ring (participants, participant chain, etc.). This is generally the part that is important for adding or moderating participants in the ring.
• static contains the static elements (images, css, templates) used to build the HTML pages generated by the generator (for front-end afficionados).

To work, we assume that a version greater than or equal to 2.2.0~beta1 of OPAM is installed on your machine (Install OPAM, upgrade to version 2.2.0~xxxx).

When you have a suitable version of OPAM, you can run the following command to build a local switch to create a sandboxed environment (with a good version of OCaml, and all the dependencies installed locally).

opam update
opam switch create . --deps-only --with-dev-setup --with-test --with-doc -y
eval $(opam env)

And that's all there is to it. Launching dune build should build the project! At present, the project simply prints to standard output, but you can build your project in bin/. YOCaml and its various plugins will be accessible in the scope of this directory. The setup should work with Vim and Emacs (if they are configured to work with OCaml) and with any editor configured to use LSP (Merlin and OCaml-lsp-server being development dependencies of the project).

Just run the ring.exe binary compiled from bin/ring.ml, which should display the manpage, giving information on how to interact with the binary, like this:

dune exec bin/ring.exe

Broadly speaking, here are the two main actions proposed by the ring.exe binary:

• dune exec bin/ring.exe display the manpage of the binary
• dune exec bin/ring.exe -- build [COMMON_OPTIONS] builds the ring in _www using the current directory as source
• dune exec bin/ring.exe -- build [COMMON_OPTIONS] [--port PORT] launches a development server that rebuilds the ring each time a page is refreshed

The common options are:

• --target PATH describes the compilation target (the directory where the ring is to be built)
• --source PATH describes the compilation source (the directory where the data of the ring are located)
• --log-level (info | app | debug | error | warning) describes the log-level

The build procedure is based on dune, without any particular sorcery, so issuing the following command is enough to run the tests:

dune test

For more information on dune testing, please go to the relevant manual page.

When you have retrieved a new version of the project (from github.com/muhokama/ring for example), you can run the following command to make sure that all the dependencies are present:

opam update
opam install . --deps-only --with-test --with-doc --with-dev-setup -y

This is important because, for the moment, ring depends on a version of YOCaml that is currently under development.

You can view the documentation for the entire project (and its dependencies) locally by running the following command:

dune build @doc-new

The doc will be generated in the following directory: _build/default/_doc_new/html/docs/index.html (with Sherlodoc for easy search by type).