ringsurf stuff
So I got a few notifications about new people joining the blogplates ring today. No new thing, I get at least 20 a week and 99% of them are people who don’t read the requirements and are submitting personal weblogs rather than design sites.
The notifications were odd, though, because they didn’t show any details like normal... so I hopped on over to the ringsurf page to see what was up. Apparently, they’ve completely redone the site under new management, and don’t have nearly the same options available to manage rings.
I did some googling to see if I could find any sites with other people talking about the changes that had been made—ringsurf’s site itself had almost no info or at least nothing helpful. I found a yahoogroup that had a bit of info, but not everything I wanted to know. So then I found a weblog that talked about the changes—Bacon, Cheese and Oatcakes. Her latest post mentions World of Webrings, which has archives of their recent discussions with the new owner. Here’s a message from him:
Ringmaster, if possible.
Let’s hope that two months is his project for all updates to be completed and that we don’t have to keep things at their current non-functional state for two whole months.
My thoughts: Ring/Queue management isn’t very straightforward anymore. And the issue that will be the most problem for me: checking the members or queue must be done one by one instead of all queued sites or all member sites. And the design/style changes aren’t very pleasing to me—the bland layout could use some clearer readability especially at full screen resolutions, there’s too much bold, and status icons aren’t next to the sites names. Plus, *every* list of sites only goes in increments of 10 to a page, which seems silly for some of the listings (stats, where its one line to a site name and 100 would fit easily). A lot of unclear grammar and spelling doesn’t help either—the features list and bug fixes is a prime example of this.
Given 20 minutes with the site templates, I bet I could clean it up and make the font tags disappear in the source and better organization!!! LOL, okay, so that’s crazy ego-talk. 
Anyhow, I’m gonna keep an eye on this...
Comments
Check out RingLink, a CGI program you can host on your own website to manage webrings. I’ve downloaded it, haven’t tested it yet, but I figured I’d pass it along.
Posted by: Mariann | November 29, 2003 06:55 PM
i was a little crabby when i found the ringsurf changes today.. i was all settled to straighten out my rings when i discovered the "improvements".. i sure hope the features really get implemented..
Posted by: Jenna | November 30, 2003 03:50 AM
Things look like they’re getting worse.
I created a new ring Saturday afternoon, added two sites to the ring, tested and all seemed right.
Got up this morning with very uninformative email that I had two new sites in the queue. I wasn’t able to check Ringsurf until this afternoon and discovered that the new ring is gone. No members, no queue, no ring.
I attempted to recreate the ring, but when I try to add members, I’m informed that that site may already be in use.
So now a ring, but apparently no way to add members from the original ring... Not nice...
Posted by: Jerry | November 30, 2003 08:27 PM