Remember Webrings?

Back in the age before search engines, the only way to find a site was usually to go to Yahoo! and find a category you liked. I tried, a lot, to get listed there, never did.

But I did do web rings. These were little image links you’d put at the bottom of your blog. You would get in touch with the owner of the web ring – like one for a band, or programming, or whatever, and they would give you a bit of code that would let you move forward or backward in the ring, of which you were now a member.

I don’t remember them being random. You’d just have neighbors. These rings typically weren’t super huge. Blogs died all the time back then, but I think most of the blogs I visited back then were on GeoCities, so they stuck around even if the owner lost interest.

Oh, I found one. I guess they did have some pretty advanced navigation.

Anyway. I want those to come back. I just want to hit a button and go somewhere that would be fun to go. I wrote a test program that will send you to a random site in my blogroll – the “Leap of Faith” button on the right there does that. I will probably add “previous” and “next” functionality, and I could probably return a list of all the sites as well.

Just taking baby steps for now…. anyway enjoy. More later.

The source code for the web ring is on GitHub if you want to give it a look. If you want the URL to the endpoint, you can find it by examining the button in dev tools.