Relics Of The Web
What’s going on, Internet? One of my favourite things about the Web is that websites can link to each other, endlessly. You follow one link, find another, lose an afternoon. That’s the whole magic of it.
A lot of the tools that made that possible in the early days have faded. Blogrolls, 88x31 buttons, webrings. You don’t see them on most sites anymore. But they’re coming back, and for good reason.
Blogrolls
Blogrolls are one of my favourite parts of personal websites.
In the early web, blogrolls and links pages were how webmasters built relationships and helped visitors discover new sites. If you liked someone’s site, you linked to it. Simple. That changed as competition for web traffic intensified. Links out became “leakage,” blogrolls got replaced with affiliate links, and the whole thing slowly died off.
They’re making a comeback. As more people get disillusioned with social media and start their own sites, blogrolls are returning as a way to build actual community. Webmasters are remembering that sharing outbound links is good, not bad.
My own blogroll is a curated list of sites I read regularly, all with RSS feeds I follow. If you’re adding one to your site, give context to your links. A bare list of URLs doesn’t help anyone. Tell people why they should click.
Keep it maintained too. Dead links are worse than no links. If you find one, consider linking to the Wayback Machine archive instead.
Buttons
88x31 buttons (88 pixels wide, 31 pixels tall) were everywhere in the early web. Netscape introduced them in the late 90s as a way to badge their browser, and they spread fast. Geocities sites were covered in them. Every webring had one. If you had a website, you had buttons.
They fell off when the web got sleeker and more commercial. Text links and banner ads took over. But they’re having a proper revival now, mostly through Neocities and communities like the 32-Bit Cafe, although I’m seeing them pop up all over the web these days.
Yequari raised a fair point in “Why Are We Still Using 88x31 Buttons?” — they’re tiny on modern screens. Something to think about as the format evolves.
If you want to dig into the world of buttons, I’ve got my own collection and here are some others worth exploring:
- Sillydog: Netscape Now Buttons
- The Button Archive at dabamos.de
- An Lucas’ 88x31 Collection
- Neonaut’s Button Collection
- Capstasher’s Button Collection
- kate.pet’s 88x31 Gallery
Webrings
A webring is a group of related websites linked together in a loop. You land on one site, hit “next,” and it takes you to another in the ring. Keep going and you eventually get back to where you started. Before search engines were any good, this was how you found new sites on a topic you cared about.
They faded as Google got better and social media took over discovery. But like blogrolls and buttons, they’re coming back. Ray’s Webring History is worth a read if you want the full picture, and his Webring List is the most comprehensive directory of active and inactive rings I’ve found.
My one gripe: surfing a webring and seeing the same sites that are in every other webring. A webring works when it’s specific: a niche, a genuine community of people who care about the same thing. Without that, it’s just another big list.
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