Webrings are an idea from the early days of the web before search engines were invented. They provide a way for people to find other sites similar to the one they are looking at. I think webrings are rather outmoded now, a bit like websites developed using frames. But for specialist sites like ours they do still serve a useful purpose and allow people to discover interesting sites they might otherwise miss.But they only work as long as the ring is maintained. Click the Next link on my site and you'll come first to a ham site with an annoying popup Java ad and then to a page that was once a QRP site informing you that Geocities has now closed.
One link will take you to the G-QRP Club website. However, this site has recently had a makeover and the webmaster clearly decided that he didn't want to spoil his layout by including the QRP Webring banner, creating another dead end.
I'm beginning to wonder whether it is worth staying a member of the webring. It brings a tiny number of visitors to the site compared to Google. I still think it is a nice idea, like the Ham Banner Exchange, but at the moment it's just broken.
Geocities shutdown recently. There was an effort to 'wget' the entire domain. Many times you can get to the page by changing geocities to reocities in the URL. There are Firefox plugins that will do this auto-magically, but for most intents and purposes this won't assist most users. You could attempt to contact the ring owner and find/replace in their DB to get a better chance the ring will be more complete.
ReplyDelete--
Mike
http://wb2b.us