The Webring Isn’t A Dinosaur, Yet

If you’ve been online a few years, you can remember the glory days of Webrings. Webrings are a directory of sites in a specific topic or main theme. There is one main site or home page which gives the links to start you surfing from one site to the next; a trail of links relevant to the topic of the webring.

Webrings used to be cutting edge - a great way to find sites and get your site found. But, things changed, as they tend to do. The original Webring site was bought by Yahoo! and then bought back or abandoned - I’ve heard both ways. But somehow it had missed its best before date. Ringsurf and a couple of other services tried to pick up the slack but there was just too much spam in that slack. So Webrings faded away, quietly.

The original idea of Webrings is still valid. More than ever, sites want to be found in all the clutter and traffic online. Each site wants to stand out and be clicked upon. The Webring isn’t a dinosaur, yet.

With all the gadgets and gizmos for blogs, they are excellent as a Webring. You can make posts about updates, new sites added, comments from the new members - whatever seems relevant or interesting. Plus all of that is bundled into a tidy, handy archive. But, you may wonder where the Webring - the links to other sites - come in. Start with something like BlogRolling and work your way along. There are plenty of options. Consider keeping a page for online bookmarks - all links in your ring. You can even just keep an updated list of all the sites in the margin of your blog. It’s so simple, even simpler than the HTML of the original Webrings. This is all something you can do yourself with minimal HTML.

For those who wonder about the first Webring, it’s here.