What Webrings Got Right

Webrings were one of those ideas that made perfect sense on the early web and then largely disappeared once search engines got better. The basic idea was simple. A group of websites covering a similar subject joined together, each site placed a small navigation block on its page, and visitors could move from one member site to the next. In a time when finding good sites was often harder than reaching them, a webring gave people a way to explore a subject without depending entirely on a search engine or directory. They were crude by modern standards, and they had plenty of problems. Links broke, sites disappeared, ringmasters lost interest, and some rings grew so large that the connection between their members became fairly loose. Even so, the structure solved several problems that still exist today. How a Webring Worked The best-known WebRing system grew out of work by Sage Weil in the mid-1990s. Earlier experiments had already linked pages in sequence, but WebRing used a central…