Out of the corner of my eye

Back in the good ol’ days, when half of the web’s personal homepages were hosted on geocities, there were a standard set of homepage ‘add ons’ that most people used: hit counters (now superceded by more complicated backend analytics programs that parse web server logs), guest books (supplanted by more general comment systems), and web rings.

Joining a web ring involved registering your site with some central server, which gave you an html fragment you pasted into your page. This fragment contained some form of description of the web ring, and “Next” and “Previous” links that would take you to your neighbouring sites in the ring.

Of course, the idea had several flaws: broken html could break the entire ring, and sites were usually subject to an approval process of some kind to make sure no inappropriate sites were included. However, despite these flaws, I found web rings could be quite interesting - it was a way of seeing other sites that covered the same interests as yours, and helped build a little bit of community into your site.

These days, it’s every man for himself in the big old world of SEO and traffic monetization. Web masters serious about promoting their site are in a perpetual backlinks arms race. It’s a shame, because in many cases, link building has overridden building quality content. People don’t really look at their competitors sites as much anymore to see what they’re doing right or read what other people have to say about a subject. Instead of community, we have competition. It’s a shame.

Is it possible to bring back some of that community, some of that “my web neighbourhood” feeling, without compromising the professional design most sites require these days? Personal blogs were embraced by many companies - perhaps one day the lowly web ring will make a comeback…