Interesting Things I've Read (or Watched) /

Some Thoughts on Webrings

Today, I found out that some students at Carleton University have started a “webring” (or well, close enough) for students in computer science and engineering to post their personal websites. (In fact, this blog also joined that webring, and you can find a link to the rest of the pages in the webring here.) I thought this was a really cool idea, so I asked how they came up with it. It turns out that a few other CS and software engineering (+ adjacent) programs in Canada have also started such webrings1. Some similar ones include:

I was pretty intrigued by this – I’ve come across the idea of a webring before, as well as other sorts of directories and lists of websites with a common ethos. I am 100% the kind of person to check those things out – I love personal websites and personal blogs and totally will follow links to other blogs and websites to see whether they interest me. I’m really enjoying looking at other students’ websites. This is super COOL.

A webring is a group of websites, linked in a circular fashion, that share a common ethos or theme. Apparently this technique was widely used in the 90s and early 2000s as a search engine optimization technique, which makes sense to me given what I know about the importance of link counts in early page ranking algorithms. According to Wikipedia, it was popular among amateur websites, and has mostly died out as a concept. However, I don’t think it’s dead at all.

The first real webring I ever came across was the Epesooj webring. I honestly have no idea why it’s called that. I found out about it because Nikhil Suresh, the guy behind the viral article titled I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again, is a member of it, and I found it while poking about the rest of his blog after reading that article to see what else was there. Webrings work, y’all – for example, I found Sidhion’s blog through it, which I never would have otherwise, and there is a lot of cool stuff to read there. This one is a webring in the traditional sense - the pages do all link together in a circular fashion, and there is a centralized page that has all of the links. And it’s a pretty small collection of pages, which makes sense, because rings are typically small. What all of the student groups I mentioned above have been creating aren’t really webrings - they’re really directories.

For example, one directory I’ve previously come across is the directory of handmade pages, which contains only links to websites that were built without the help of a JavaScript framework. (I never realized how much cool stuff people are doing in pure HTML/CSS/JS - please don’t hurt me.). There is also the directory of now pages, which is a directory of links to pages on personal websites that have a page describing what the author is doing right now. (The concept was invented by Derek Sivers and you can read about it here.)

Anyway, here is a history of webrings, and here is a list of webrings (real webrings, in the traditional sense), both created by Raymond Thomas. His entire website is fascinating and I’m sure I’ll fall down its rabbithole eventually.

  1. A student in SE at Waterloo was the first to do this, of course. Why do Waterloo students get to have the monopoly on cool ideas? ↩︎

 Interesting Things I've Read (or Watched)