What is a WebRing?
A webring is a totally free service offered to the Internet
community. It provides a different way to organize content
on the World Wide Web. (After all, endless pages of links
or lists from search engines are only so interesting.) The
webring is a way to group together sites with similar content
by linking them together in a circular fashion: a ring.
How does a WebRing 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 could do 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.
With the larger webring promoters, such as Yahoo, the website
information is kept in a database, so all you put on your
page is a single link that never has to be changed. When another
site is added to the webring, the database is updated and
all the sites in the webring are updated along with it.
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