When you talk about the shape of cyberspace, webrings are one of the ways that cyberspace can be twisted into a circle. A webring is a ring of links. There are probably webrings for everything and they are good for small sites that need readers. People like to follow the ring links to find more pages like the one that they are on. You can see the ring badge over on the right side of this page, down below the recent posts and the amazon ad.

Webrings are a tried and true promotional tool. You don’t get many hits, but they are steady and they grow fast as the ring grows. If you have a blog, you’ll benefit from the traffic on other sites in the ring. When a surfer finishes reading your page, they can click on “next” and go to the next page in the ring. It’s a win-win situation.

The hard part, however is getting the ring code on your page in the right place. When you join up, the webring site gives you a code snippet that you have to copy into your blog template. In Geeklog, you create a widget with the Javascript in it. In Blogger, you have have to edit the template. In WordPress, there is a plugin for putting javascript on your blog, or you can edit the template directly if you are techy enough.

The easiest place to put the javascript is way down at the bottom of the web page template, just before the /body tag. This effectively hides it, though so try to get it into the left or right side panel near your links or blog roll so that it is closer to the top.

The Spec Fic Bloggers badge is 160 pixels wide, just the right size for most blogs.

I just updated the code to bring it into the 21st century. It uses fancy css and gets rid of the clunky table format.

Please join up. The traffic grows exponentially with the number of sites in the ring. 10 sites get four times the traffic as 5 sites. 20 sites get 16 times the traffic as 5 sites. If you know any spec-fic bloggers that have control over their blog templates, send them this way. It will help all of us.

Join the Speculative Fiction Bloggers Webring.