Introduction
I know some of you won't believe me, but a long time ago, when the internet was young, there was no such thing as Google. Honestly, I'm not making that up. By the time I started this site in 1999, most of the current search engines had already been around for a couple of years, Excite, Google, Lycos, MSN, WebCrawler, Yahoo and the rest but they were slow and hadn't indexed that many sites. Not that there many around, around 2 million as compared to today's 1 billion (January 2014). In January 2023, there are around 2 billion.
What Webrings Are
Webrings were, and still are, a system that grouped and linked web sites of similar content together. A webring manager would create a piece of code either using their own independent system or one from the organizations such as RingSurf, Bravenet's Site Ring, WebRing, WebRingo, RingLink (later World of Webrings (WOW) and later Web Ring World), Alt-Webring, RingsWorld, Looplink, OneSeek's WebChains or one of the others.
People would ask to join a webring and they would, if accepted, be given a unique identifier, the images, and the code to be placed on one of their pages. There were a variety of methods used to display the images and links. Bravenet's Sitering used an image map, Ringsurf used tables and Webring used either a JavaScript snippet or a table at different times. Some ring managers would insist that the webring code be placed on the homepage, others would allow them to be placed on a "web ring" or links page.
The code would usually provide links to the ring home, links to the next and previous in the ring and be able to provide a list of sites in the webring. Some would even pick a random page to visit.
A Short History of Ringlink
Denis Howe started EUROPa (Expanding Unidirectional Ring Of Pages) at Imperial College in 1994. The idea developed further when Giraldo Hierro conceptualized a central CGI (Common Gateway Interface) script to enhance functionality. Sage Weil developed such a script in May 1994. Weil's script gained popularity, pushing Weil in June 1995 to form a company called WebRing.
By the beginning of 1997, there were over 1,000 webrings just on WebRing. By May of 1997 over 10,000. By April, 1998, there were over 40,000. By January 2000 there were over 80,000 which were used by around 1.5 million sites. The end came on August 15, 2020, when webring.com became inaccessible.
RingLink here and here (both links to the Internet Archive) first appeared on February 22, 2001. In 2002, Gunnar created The World of Webrings (Internet Archive) that later morphed into Web Ring World. Although no longer a webring system, the site has some very useful information for webring managers and members.
It seems that the owner, Gunnar Hjalmarsson, had his hosting company unexpectedly close down in 2014 causing the change of URL. WOW was also a place to discuss the various webring systems while RingLink was the actual code base, a CGI Perl program. Ringlink v1 appeared in February 2001. The last was version was version 3.4 in January 2017. I revisited Web Ring World in December 2021, and it seems completely broken. Only 17 sites in 6 webrings are listed and those sites are all appear to be built on the same template and none of them have a link back into the other sites in the ring. The WOW Webring site disappeared in 2015, but Web Ring World is still available (February 2023) as a history of webrings.
Gunnar also seems to have hosted other webring systems on his site which used RingLink. One such was Web Ring System (Internet Archive) which ran from February 2003, to December 2004. It used Ringlink version 3.1.
CrickRock (Internet Archive) was powered by the RingLink Perl program. The domain was still active but giving a SQL error when I checked it on October 28, 2014. CrickRock appeared in December 2000 and lasted until late 2008.
Stardust (Internet Archive) was a webring system that used RingLink. It appeared in January 2001 but had gone again by the end of 2003. It used Ringlink version 1.13.
Page-Ring (Internet Archive) appeared in February 2001 but was gone by November of the same year. It appears to have used Gunnar Hjalmarsson's RingLink Perl code base.
Alt-Webring (Internet Archive) was owned by Andrew McPhee who started it in April 2003 due to his dissatisfaction with the other webrings. It used the Ringlink Perl program by Gunnar Hjalmarsson. In 2014, it was still going but the webring directory was broken. The site closed in February 2015. It started with Ringlink version 2.37 and ended with version 3.3.
Lord of the Rings (LOR)(Internet Archive) also used RingLink and that was operating from September 2005 until October 2008. It used Rinklink 3.2.
As Ringlink was very well written it was used by a number of individuals, companies and organizations. Some were listed on the original Ringlink pages, here and here (both Internet Archive). There are some instances still on the internet, but most are no longer active, such as Anvilfire which uses Rinklink v2.37, GeoSciences e-Journals which uses Rinklink v3.2, Lord of the Rings, and The Legacy Precepts Ring.
My own installation of Ringlink uses version 3.4, which I installed in June 2024.
Gunnar Hjalmarsson (1958 - 2023)
Gunnar Hjalmarsson was born on October 6, 1958, and lived in Gothenburg, Sweden. He obtained a Bachelor's degree of Business Administration in Accounting from the University of Gothenburg, and worked with the audit and business consulting firm PwC for about 25 years, of which about 15 years as a partner. Gunnar was an authorized auditor and financial reporting advisor.
Gunnar wrote Ringlink in Perl in 2001 with the last release, version 3.4 being in 2017. He had no formal computing or IT education. The computing skill he had was gained from learning some web programming and developing a couple of web site scripts, one of which became Ringlink. He was active in the Perl community for many years.
He started using Ubuntu in July 2010 and submitted his first bugfix in September. He also began contributing to Ubuntu’s desktop documentation in 2011. Gunnar became a member of the Ubuntu Documentation Team, the Ubuntu Desktop Team, and a Ubuntu Core Developer. He was also a leader of both the Ubuntu Swedish local community and Ubuntu Translators. He also contributed his volunteer work to Debian, becoming a Debian Developer and a member of the Debian GNOME and Input Method teams.
Gunnar died on December 20, 2023.