>so you want more hits to your site? you wanna
be an interNETional superstar? and you don't know where to start? join
linkexchange. hand out flyers. scrawl your url on the wall of every starbucks
toilet from here to antartica. but for the love of god, don't waste your time
submitting to a webring. you'll be old and grey by the time they get around to
reviewing your site, and you'll likely be dead by the time you get the email
telling you whether or not you've been accepted. right....but what i mean to talk about here is
webrings. sooner or later, SOMEBODY besides me is going to have to notice the
problem on their own, but with the vast majority of the population not nearly
as consumed with finding fault in everyday things (particularly the cursed
blasted internet) as myself, i'm guessing it'll take them a bit. and, as we say
in the old country, i haven't got all day. so let me help (please). here's how
it goes, this webring-submitting lark. you find a ring you think you'd like to
join. you fill out a preposterously long form in which you must include
everything short of your great-great-grandmother's maiden name, and then you
submit it to the ring master (this is only one of the many things about webring
that calls to mind a circus) the next time you check your email, you will find
there an equally preposterously long missive from webring, a form-letter sent
out to you via automatic mailer, telling you your site's been submitted for
review (DUH...as if you didn't know that already, yourself being the one
SUBMITTING it) and giving you a sense of false hope as well as an
html-javascriptish code to place on the main page of your site. it informs you
that without this fragment, you have an ice-cube's chance in hell of being
accepted, as if to imply you had any more than that chance WITH the feckin'
code. the fragment in question is oddly-coloured and quite unattractive,
designed specifically to clash god-awfully with the colour scheme of 99.9% of
all websites on the net. but you'll put up with it for the extra hits, right?
heh...heh...heh... so, you might be wondering what happened to my
webring fragment (or even if you're not, i'll tell you anyway) after not
hearing from EITHER of the two rings i submitted to for over 2 months, i got rid
of the blasted thing. fuck them all to hell, if people really want to find me,
they'll somehow manage with or without bloody webring, and if they can't, then
they're stupid asses and i don't want their kind darkening my virtual door-way
anyhow. now, if you'll excuse me, i'm off to the city to finish my
starbucks-toilet advertising campaign...
now, apparently, at some time in the
not-too-distant past, this thing called webring actually served a purpose. this
was back when it first started, when my use of the net was purely experimental
(limited to a now-defunct interactive top-ten site, to be specific) but as my
luck would have it, when i finally decided to call upon it's services, webring
had just been taken over by yahoo, one of the 2 companies from which all
internet evil flows (ao-hell being the other...more on THAT later)
as anyone who's ever had to deal with yahoo
already knows, it sorta has the midas touch...but with one difference.
everything king midas touched turned to gold, whereas everything yahoo touches
turns to shit. yahoo clubs become gates to harrassment and hacking, yahoo mail
can be logged into and read by everyone EXCEPT the subscriber, and
geocities...well, let me just put it this way for ye...see any broken images on
here? having trouble loading any of the pages? well, that there would be
geocities' speciality. (and fyi...to avoid being TOO MUCH of a hypocrite, i
WILL be moving to another server shortly, soon as i've time to shift the files.
i'll keep ye posted)
soooo...you place the cursed bit of
computerised ugliness on your once-lovely site, and then sit and wait, cos in
"a few weeks", they tell you, you'll be getting another email teling
you whether you've been accepted or rejected. now i don't know what the FUCK
exactly these people consider "a few weeks", but in MY mixed-up little
world, that would consist of 2...perhaps 3...maybe even 4 weeks, at the most.
and LOGICALLY a ring with roundabout 15 existing members couldn't possibly
generate more requests than the ring master can handle (or if it DOES, perhaps
he shouldn't've started a webring in the first place...i know I don't have the
time to police a webring, but then that's why i don't HAVE one) when i don't
get a response in over a month, i just assume the guy just can't be arsed doing
anything and that kind of pisses me off. i mean, i bothered filling out that
asinine form however long ago, what the hell would it take for him to write me
an email simply saying either "okay, you're in" or "your site's
shite; i don't think so"? i quite frankly don't care whether i'm accepted
or rejected. i realise what's good and what isn't, creatively speaking, is a
totally subjective thing and i'm submitting my site to the ringmaster's opinion
as well as his ring. but i WOULD like to know this lazy git at best bothered to
LOOK at it long enough to decide it was crap, if for no other reason than to
let me take that hieous pink table off the bottom of my main file, as it's
serving no purpose other than to make my visitors sick to their stomachs.