Webring.com is an organisation that helps organise webrings, like-minded
websites that link to each other in circle. on managing and joining them. Though
it is actually very simple, about 50% of people who apply to join rings fail.
Introduction
This document will lead you step by step through what to do to get your website
on a webring. It sounds complicated, but you go step by step, you will succeed. Webring.com
is an organisation that helps organise webrings, like-minded websites that link
to each other in circle. Webrings bring more people to your site. Webrings are
composed of websites, not email ids. WebRings are free; you are not required to
place any ads on your site. To become part of the ring, you embed a piece of
JavaScript HTML on your webpage called a navbar (or
sometimes a SSNB -- Server Side
Navigation Bar). A nav bar renders something like this:
The noscript part of it handles browsers that
don't have JavaScript enabled. People can visit each website in the ring in turn
by clicking on the nav bar next button.
If you don't have a website, you can get a free one from Angelfire
or GeoCities. You can't join a ring until
you have a working website with something on it to show people. In a pinch, you
might borrow a corner of somebody else's website.
You will need to learn HTML or some HTML generating tool.
You will need some simple (often free) tools to write and validate
your HTML. You will need an FTP tool to upload your
creation from your local hard disk to the webserver. I use Netload
which completely automates the process and FTP Voyager
to recover when things go off the rails. The coming instructions look
intimidating. Admittedly they are long-winded, but they are not that difficult
if you go step by step. It might help to print out these instructions, and tick
them off as you complete each step.
Yahoo vs Webring.com
Yahoo has abandoned webrings. They are now handled by webring.com. You must
migrate over all your rings from yahoo.com back to webring.com and redo all your
nav bars yet again. Phtt! You need to set up a new login id on Webring.com.
Like the last migration, this one was also a schmozzle. The nav bars sometimes
don't work. Further, they contain html errors. The require everyone manually
move all their rings and manually modify all the nav bars in the universe.
The good news is that the new nav bars are better, and the management code is
better than they were on Yahoo. If you are starting afresh, you need not bother
with Yahoo at all.
Joining New Rings
This section applies to everyone joining a ring.
Click on Join Now on the nav bar of some site already
in the ring and follow your nose. This will take you to WebRing.com, the company
that manages the rings. Alternatively, click here
to go to Webring.com.
If you don't already have a webring.com login id, you can choose an id and
password. You will use this id for all your rings, not just for the one ring you
are joining. click here to
sign up
Click join ring on somebody's nav bar who is already
in the ring, or else find some ring in the huge hierarchy of possibilities.
You will be asked to describe your site and give its URL. Make sure you give the
URL of the page where you plan the put the nav bar, not your home page (unless
of course you plan to put the nav bar on your home page). This is the landing
place where arriving visitors start their tour of your site. It is also the
taking off place for them to depart to the next site on the ring. Giving the
wrong URL is the most common error.
Filling in that form will generate an automatic email to me telling me, the
ringmaster, that you want to join the ring. I have to ok your application.
Click My Rings at the top of the page.
Click View Web Sites on the left.
Click Get SSNB code next to the corresponding webring.
It will show you a piece of gobbledegook html something like this:
<script language=javascript
src="http://ss.webring.com/navbar?f=j;y=roedygr;u=10005880"></script>
<noscript><center><table bgcolor=gray cellspacing=0 border=2
bordercolor=red>
<tr><td><table cellpadding=2 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr><td
align=center>
<font face=arial size=-1>This site is a member of WebRing.
To browse visit <a href="http://ss.webring.com/navbar?f=l;y=roedygr;u=10005880">
here</a>.</font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></center></noscript>
This is the nav bar you have been hearing so much about. A single nav bar
handles all the rings that use the same URL. Cut and paste it into your web page.
Make sure you get the whole thing including the final </script>.
Don't copy my nav bars. They won't work for you. You need to get versions
customised for you.
HTMLValidator will complain that the nav bar is
not valid HTML, so you might be tempted to correct it, adding the missing type
and quotes. However, if you do that, unfortunately the automated-nav-bar-finder
will fail, and you will find yourself automatically suspended from the ring. You
must use the nav bar exactly as given. use the <cseignore> </cseignore>
to tell it to ignore the errors.
The most important thing to understand is that the nav bar must be
displayed on the page where you want the web ring to send visitors when they
first land on your site, on the precise URL you told Webring.com. The
automated Webring.com link-checking software is not smart enough to go searching
for it. This rigid scheme has the added benefit of making it easy for users to
find the link to the next website after they have explored your site.
This section is only for advanced users using frames. You have five choices.
Klutzy
: Point Webring directly to the frame containing your rings, and provide a link
on that page back to your home page which then redisplays the surrounding frames.
The page will first appear without its normal enclosing frame.
Ruthless
: Put your nav bar on a non-frame page.
Theoretically Correct
: Create a new frameset page very much like your index.html
page. The difference is it brings up your rings page inside the frame instead of
the usual default index page. You point Webring.com to that enclosing frameset
page. Unfortunately, Webring cannot always find the nav bar if it is embedded in
a frame. At times it seems to, then loses the ability.
Advanced
: use multiple copies of the nav bar. There will be one landing place and many
taking off places. I will explain this in greater detail later. Use one of the
other techniques for your landing place. No matter what else you do, you must
always have a valid nav bar for that URL on the landing page.
Optimisitic
: Just put the nav bar in a frame and hope for the best. It might work.
I repeat. It is won't work to point the URL to your home page, and then hide
the nav bar on some other page. Webring's automatic link checker can't find
the nav bar and it will automatically suspend you. You must put the nav bar
on the exact URL of the page that you tell Webring.com when you join the ring.
Upload the page to your website. Remember to re-upload every time you change the
HTML or your site content.
Usually your nav bar will start working within seconds after I approve your site.
Until then, nothing will happen, so not to panic. Eventually, the nav bar will
eventually show up looking something like this:
If you don't get your nav bar successfully installed, the automatic nav bar
checker will suspend you. This is so that people using the ring won't get stuck
when they come to your site. It means nothing at all about the quality of your
site. It is no reason to panic. Further, if for any reason your nav bar stops
working at some point in future, Webring.com will automatically suspend you
until you get the problem fixed.
Making Changes
If later you want to change some of the information about your site, such as its
name, description or URL, go to Webring.com
and click View Ring Sites.
Then click the line representing your web page. The most likely thing you would
want to change is your URL if you decide to move the nav bar to a new page. Make
sure you get a new nav bar when you change the URL. It is confusing, because
the old nav bar may appear to work, at least for a while.
Advanced users might experiment with populating their site with extra copies of
the master nav bar(s). All visitors, however, will land only on the URL
registered with Webring.com. I don't recommend this for the novice. If you
belong to several different rings, particularly if they are supposed to land at
different parts of your site, you could get hopelessly confused with none of
your nav bars working. If that happens to you, not to panic. Erase all the nav
bars, get fresh copies from Webring.com, double checking your registered URLs,
and place them only one per page, on the official page that you registered with
Webring.com. It helps if you label your nav bar with the name of the page where
they officially are supposed to be. Don't experiment with this until after you
get everything working with a single copy of each nav bar. It is quite mind
boggling the way you can have several different nav bars on a page each
displaying several different rings. You can even duplicate the same nav bar at
top and bottom of the same page. Again, placing duplicate nav bars deliberately
on the wrong page is a technique for intrepid computer geeks only.
Normally the following nav bars would be coalesced into one, but I am cheating
to produce this demonstration and these nav bars are deliberate duplicates not
on their proper pages registered with Webring.com.
If you have trouble with one of the rings I manage, you can email
me or phone me, Roedy Green, at (250) 361-9093. That is in Victoria, BC
Canada. However, there are many things I cannot do for you.
I can't put your nav ring in for you (unless you trust me with your ISP id/password
and FTP trivia) to upload the finished result.
Unless you give me your Webring.com id/password, I can't change your URL.
Unless you give me your Webring.com id/password, I can't change your site name.
Unless you give me your Webring.com id/password, I can't change your site
description.
You normally have to do all those things for yourself.
Bugs
Before you report a bug check the user guide.
It may not be a bug, but a feature. Here are some of the bugs/shortcomings I
have detected in the Webring.com ring management software. If you notice that
any of these have been fixed, please let me know.
These are bugs I discovered at the time Yahoo.com was
running the webring. I have not yet retested to see if these bugs have been
fixed. Be wary of them.
Webring.com Bugs
Bug
Fixed?
Description
Wrong ringmaster email id
N
There is no way to change the ringmaster's email id.
ringmaster change
Y
There is no way to have a new ringmaster take over.
Nav bar finder can't find the nav bar if HTML errors in it are corrected.
Can't find old gif-style ring logo
Y
Nav bar finder can't see the old graphics style nav bars previously used
when webrings.org managed the rings. It thinks the link is broken.
frames confuse nav bar
Y
Nav bar finder can't see a nav bar in a frame. It thinks the link is broken.
bad sort
Y
Your personal list of rings are not sorted in alphabetical or any other
meaningful order. In contrast, ringmaster can order the sites in the ring any
way they choose.
url not displayed
Y
The list of all rings you are joined to does not display the URLs of your
web pages.
ringmaster hamstrung
N
Ringmasters can't correct spelling and grammatical errors in site
descriptions. They can't correct URLs. They can't get nav bars for people to
insert in HTML and send back for upload.
wrong ordering
N
Ringmasters are asked to approve websites before the nav bars are installed.
Sites without nav bars should never be activated.
invalid email ids
N
Webring.com approves rings sites where there is no way to contact the site
manager by email.
ring home page
Y
Webmaster cannot explicitly designate the ring's home page.
restart
N
When ringmasters manage sites, the lists start over at the beginning each
time, rather than picking up where you left off.
mysterious nav bar codes
N
Nav bars use a special code that ties them to a particular page. You can't
verify they are correct, other than by installing new nav bars. I think it might
be possible to have standard nav bars that can be safely duplicated moved about,
even between sites. Not a single member of one of my rings was able to
successfully install a nav bar!
dead rings
N
Most rings are dead. These is no way before you go to the effort of joining
to see when the ringmaster last did any ring management.
nav bar test
N
There is no way to trigger a bulk retest of multiple broken nav bars. There
is no way to know how fresh the test results are.
nav bar box too small
Y
Box where you pick up the nav bar is too small to let you view it all at
once or copy/paste it without scrolling.
Ring image does not display.
N
Even when you have a ring image, it does not display in the editing screens.
ugly image
partly
There need to be two images, one tiny one 32x32 for the nav bar and one big
one 150x150 to decorate the ring hub. Webring.com expanded the size of the big
image, but send it also for the nav bar, without first converting it to a
thumbnail. Even if they did that it would look bad. You really need a gif
designed to look good at a small size.
The more people who report a given bug, the more likely Webring.com is to take
the bug report seriously, and to give that bug priority.
Trouble Shooting
If your nav bar does not work, double check the following:
Is the nav bar on the exact same URL you told Webring.com? If not, either tell
Webring.com (on the appropriate form) the correct place or move the nav bar to
the correct page.
Get a fresh nav bar. Nav bars only work properly on the page they were created
for.
Don't change the nav bar HTML in any way. Don't even put a carriage return in
the middle of it.
Alternatives
See RingSurf, a competing WebRing scheme. If you
hope to hide from nav bars by going to RingSurf you are out of luck. They are in
the process of converting to nav bars too. RingSurf and Webring.com nav bars are
handled completely independently. If you have both RingSurf and Webring.com
rings on the same page, you need both a RingSurf and a Webring.com nav bar.
Once you get the hang of it, joining WebRings is easy. You don't have to keep
adding more nav bars past the first one. You can browse the list
of existing rings. and join the ones you like, or just chase the links
visiting sites exploring the creativity of your fellow humans.
To make all the webrings show up, use the ;&top=n
parameter after the &u= parameter in the nav bar.
Otherwise visitors to your site have to click to see the others. I know of no
way to control the order the various rings appear.
Starting Your own WebRing
If you don't see a suitable WebRing to join, you can create
your own WebRing. All you need is a logo gif in both 50x50 for the nav bars
and 150x150 (up to 250x250) for the hub. pixels, best with a transparent
background, that you could prepare with Paint Shop Pro.
Browse the Webring.com categories to
find where it would fit, then click create a ring and
follow your nose. At first you will tend to get lost in the menus. Be patient
with yourself and you will find you can soon manage several rings with very
little effort. The real work talking people into joining your ring. It is hard
at the beginning and gets easier as the ring grows and becomes ever more
attractive.
It works best if you provide a URL instead uploading your logos. Your server
will be faster than theirs. Also they seem to compress and distort the images,
so the URL method gives nicer looking images.
Webring automatically tests member sites periodically to make sure they are
properly installed. They can fail or pass or pass-L. Pass-L
means he put the nav bar on a different page from where incoming visitors land,
but that they can get to the nav bar to leave in one link. Typically visitors
land on the home page, and click webrings to get to the nav bars. It is a
judgement call whether you should allow these. I do not. They make it harder for
visitors to navigate to the next link.
Last updated 2004-06-28 by Roedy
Green ©1996-2004 Canadian Mind Products
WebRing
