I had the thought the other day that one of the most valuable things a human-driven website could offer would be a webring linking to other human-driven websites
I had the thought the other day that one of the most valuable things a human-driven website could offer would be a webring linking to other human-driven websites
I'm a fan of bringing back Web Rings.
Perhaps a site could kick off where people proposed sites for Web Rings, edited them. The sites in question could somehow adopt them — perhaps by directly pulling from the Web Ring site.
And while we're at it, no reason for the Web "Ring" not to occasionally branch, bifurcate, and even rejoin threads from time to time. It need not be a simple linked list who's tail points back to it's head.
Happy to mock something up if someone smarter than me can fill in the details.
Pick a topic: Risograph printers? 6502 Assembly? What are some sites that would be in the loop? Would a 6502 Assembly ring have "orthogonal branches" to the KIM-1 computer (ring)? How about a "roulette" button that jumps you to somewhere at random in the ring? (So not linear.) Is it a tree or a ring? If a tree, can you traverse in reverse?
Web rings are a thing I've been thinking about a bit. Anyone know any good ones? There are a couple I reached out to for one of the projects I'm working on, to get my site on them, but I never got responses. There are also some webrings I've come across that have died or been retired. :(
Yeah, the dynamic (remote) web ring server I am conceiving would handle dead the links in the ring.
There's still the buy-in problem though. Convincing the owners of the sites you want in the ring to modify their HTML to dynamically fetch and display the ring links.
That's something I really enjoy about web 1.0: links pages. We need to bring back the days when every site had a giant list of links to other sites. I don't care if half of them end up as dead links. This is part of what made the web fun. You'd come across a site, see what it had to offer, and then you'd check the links page and find five, ten, or 20 other sites offering similar things. No need for algorithms tracking your every move to recommend things to you... the content itself would do that.