What is a webring?

What is a WebRing?

The Webring provides the Internet community with a different way to organize content on the World Wide Web.

After all, endless pages of links and search engine results are only so interesting.

The Webring is a way to group together sites with similar content (or any pages at all, if one so desires) by linking them together in a circular fashion: a ring.

How does it work?

The idea is that once you are at one site in the "ring," you can click on a "Next" or "Previous" link to go to the next site in the ring and--if you do it long enough-- end up where you started.

Obviously, this is something that anyone simply by getting together with a few other people and having each person add a link to their page pointing to the next person in the loop.

However, when somebody wants to join the ring, someone has to edit their page to point to the new page and--when the ring gets big enough--it becomes more and more difficult to keep the ring "intact" when pages go down.

The Webring provides a solution to all of these problems, as well as numerous enhancements.

When you join a Webring, the HTML code on your homepage never changes. Links point to a special CGI script at webring.org that will send people to the next (or previous) site in the ring.

Because the central ring database is located in one location, sites can be added and removed quickly and easily, and because the Webring CGI allows you go continue past sites that are unreachable, you will always be able to continue around the loop.

The Webring will do quite a few tricks, actually. People can travel a ring in either direction, either jumping to (or skipping) the next site or previous site, list the next five sites in the ring, jump to a random site in the ring, or simply get a list of all pages in the loop.

Furthermore, the Webring system supports the operation an virtually unlimited number of separate and distinct rings, allowing the creation of hundreds--even thousands--of different "communities" on the web.

And, best of all, the Webring is entirely free!

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