Wander 0.2.0

Wander 0.2.0 is the second release of Wander, a small, decentralised, self-hosted web console that lets visitors to your website explore interesting websites and pages recommended by a community of independent personal website owners. To try it, go to susam.net/wander.

This release brings a number of improvements. When I released version 0.1.0, it was the initial version of the software I was using for my own website. Naturally, I was the only user initially and I only added trusted web pages to the recommendation list of my console. But ever since I announced this project on Hacker News, it has received a good amount of attention. It has been less than a week since I announced it there but over 30 people have set up a Wander console on their personal websites. There are now over a hundred web pages being recommended by this network of consoles. With the growth in the number of people who have set up Wander console, came several feature requests, most of which have been implemented already. This release makes these new features available.

Since Wander 0.2.0, the wander.js file of remote consoles is executed in a sandbox iframe to ensure that it has no side effects on the parent Wander console page. Similarly, the pages recommended by the network are also loaded into a sandbox iframe.

This release also brings several customisation features. Console owners can customise their Wander console by adding custom CSS or JavaScript. Console owners can also block certain URLs from ever being recommended on their console. This is especially important in providing a good wandering experience to visitors. Since this network is completely decentralised, console owners can add any web page they like to their console. Sometimes they inadvertently add pages that do not load successfully in the console due to frame embedding restrictions. This leads to an uneven wandering experience because these page recommendations occasionally make it to other consoles where they fail to load. Console owners can now block such URLs in their console to decrease the likelihood of these failed page loads. This helps make the wandering experience smoother.

Another significant feature in this release is the expanded Console dialog box. This dialog box now shows various details about the console and the current wandering session. For example, it shows the console's configuration: recommended pages, ignored URLs and linked consoles. It also shows a wandering history screen where you can see each link that was recommended to you along with the console that recommendation came from. There is another screen that shows all the consoles discovered during the discovery process. Those who care about how Wander works would find this dialog box quite useful. To check it out, go to my Wander console and explore.

To learn more about Wander, how it works and how to set it up, please read the project README at codeberg.org/susam/wander.