A web ring allows a group of sites on the web to point to each other in - you guessed it - a ring formation. For an imaginary 3-person ring of A, B, and C, it would work like this: A's site points forward to B's site and back to C's site, B's site points forward to C's site and back to my A's site, C's site points forward to A's site and back to B's site. Still confused? Why don't you check a out a webring on my linkpage: http://hansemann.com/Renee/Babylinks.htm
So the idea is that once you are at one site in the webring, you can click on a "Next" or "Previous" link to go to adjacent sites in the ring and - if you do it long enough - end up where you started.
This is actually something you can do without the Webring system by simply having each page owner link their site to the next. 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 disappear and servers go down. Like a mailing list, it's easy to do this by hand if there's only a few sites and they don't change much. It gets a lot harder as it gets bigger, so the webring software at www.webring.org automates the process. When you apply to join the ring, you're added to a queue, and you receive e-mail that gives you the code to put at the bottom of your page. Once you've added that code, you e-mail any member of the ring and ask them to move you from the queue to the ring itself. When they do, you get inserted into the ring just after the person who added you. Take a look at the bottom of my linkpage (http://hansemann.com/Renee/MyWebrings/), to see some examples of webrings and to see what the code looks like. (But don't copy it; the site ID is different for each site!) The Webring provides a solution to all of these problems, as well as numerous enhancements. When you join a Webring, the HTML code on your homepage never changes. Links point to a special CGI script at webring.org that will send people to the next (or previous) site in the ring. Because the central ring database is located in one location, sites can be added and removed quickly and easily, and because the Webring CGI allows you go continue past sites that are unreachable, you will always be able to continue around the loop. The ring server does some other things that make the ring work more smoothly, too. It's easy to change your address in the ring whenever you need to, to get a list of all the ring sites, or even to get the e-mail addresses of everyone with a site on the ring. (The last one can only be done by the ringmaster, however - that's me, Renee's mom at this time.)
