by Gunnar Hjalmarsson
July 31, 2003

Exactly three years ago, Ringlink 1.0 was released through an announcement at the old RingManager mailing list at eGroups. Below please find "The Birth of Ringlink" out from my perspective. To some extent it also contains some rhapsodical comments on WebRing, but I think it has to be that way. WebRing was first, WebRing is the giant, and most things about webrings take place in the shadow of WebRing. That's how it is.

The Quotation Ring

Some people would not consider me to be much of a ringmaster. I have one webring, the only ring I ever had. This story needs to begin with that ring, the Quotation Ring.

I started it about 5.5 years ago on the WebRing system. I had just created a tiny personal site, that happened to include a quotes page, and linking together quotations pages around the world appeared to be a nice idea.

The Quotation Ring had already been started, but when I tried to join, the ringmaster proved to have lost her interest. This was far before "adoptions" were administered by the WebRing staff, so I emailed the ringmaster, got her blessing to start my own ring with the same name, and also got her permission to use the graphics.

I customized the ring, including the list page, which was fully customizable. (You were even allowed to suppress the few ads that existed at that time.) Then I looked for quotations sites on the web, and invited the webmasters to join. Think I sent somewhere between 75-100 such invitations. I started a discussion forum for the ring members, and the ring grew rapidly.

There was an independent mailing list for WebRing users, and a few Usenet groups, where ringmasters helped each other and exchanged opinions and experiences.

The Quotation Ring grew to a few hundred member sites, and I was 'in charge'. The members showed their appreciation. I was proud.

It was fun!

Exciting news

There was an IT boom out there. The WebRing ownership was changed a couple of times, probably resulting in some people getting rich, while others (Yahoo!) paid a fortune for WebRing, and after a while they wanted to get some return from their investment.

Things began to change, and the changes were typically presented as "exciting news". You were no longer allowed to suppress the ads. Yahoo's strategy, to utilize the huge database with ringmasters and members to drive as much traffic as possible to their pages, became more and more evident. The "Hub" page, with a lot of links to various Yahoo! owned resources, replaced the highly customizable list page. Navigating a webring was not as pleasant as it used to be.

The support at WebRing was either unavailable, or unreceptive for suggestions.

It was not as fun as before.

A new mailing list, "RingManager" [1], was established by Dave Kay as the new forum for the ring community. RingManager aimed to support the original ideas with webrings. Now it was the beginning of the year 2000.

[1] To my knowledge, the archive from that time has been removed.

Webring script?

I had installed and modified a couple of simple CGI scripts, and I started to play with the thought of creating a script as a collaborative effort among a few dedicated ringmasters, that could serve a webring from any site. Such a script would make it possible to design my ring exactly as I wanted it to be, and I would get full control.

I knew I wasn't able to do it myself. For gods sake, I was not a programmer! But when testing the idea at "RingManager", I got some positive responses.

Okay, now there were already a few webring scripts. None of the scripts I explored was good enough, at least in my opinion. But maybe one of them could be made "open source", forming the starting-point of a full-fledged webring script? Why re-invent the wheel? I tried to convince the owner of RingWorld of that idea, but was turned down. "We can't do that."

Mike Rudberg started the Ringers project. Maybe that was it? However, Mike had decided to use the C programming language, and to me that seemed not to be the right choice for the wide-spread script that I would like to see.

So, how would you organize a few ringmasters, spread around the world, to write a webring program from scratch? Especially when you knew very little about programming yourself? I had absolutely no idea. The crazy idea, to start by my own, was born. With a programming experience basically limited to customizing a guestbook script and studying a couple of webring scripts, I began.

Reading a book or two about Perl and CGI had been very appropriate, but that was not what I did. Instead I surfed the web for guidance as soon as I encountered a problem. Which I of course did for basically every new step I took...

It was utmost irrational. But slowly, slowly I made progress. And it was fun! Finally, after having dedicated the whole summer (fortunately a rather rainy summer) to Ringlink, I was able to share it with the world at July 31, 2000.