Web Rings - a useful navigational tool

MANY WEB navigation and searching tools/services such as search engines, subject gateways and search bots have been developed to help the netizens from getting lost in the information-ridden cyberspace and aimlessly wandering here and there. Web ring is one among them.

A web-ring is a set of web sites that share topics of common nature. Suppose you are a doctor doing research on cancer. Assume you have created a web site to disseminate your research findings and other related information to other fellow researchers and persons with similar interests. Apart from your site, you know about the sites run by other members in your peer group. A person who visits your site to know information on the latest developments in cancer research will benefit more if you can provide a mechanism for him/her to jump from one cancer site to another. The web ring technology attempts to do this.

To create a web ring, you need to collect all the web addresses of the sites you want to be included in your ring, arrange them in a series and announce in your site that it is a part of a web ring. Along with this information, place links to the sites before/after your page in the ring. You should also send this information (regarding the neighbor sites) to other members of the ring so that they can also present it in their web pages. Once a ring is created, a user who visits your site (or any of the other site involved in the ring), can traverse the whole ring by moving from one site to the other and this way you can optimise his Net time.

Ring creation services

Creating a web ring, though technically feasible, is not an efficient solution. It is difficult to administer web rings this way - for example, if you want to add more sites into the ring the task will certainly become a difficult one. The best solution is to rope in the service of a web ring generator that provides the necessary tools to create/manage a web ring. One such service is 'RingSurf' available at ringsurf.com.

Creating a web ring will take a few seconds - just start clicking at the 'Create Ring' button. Once the ring creation process is finished, the service will e-mail your web ring details. After the web ring comes into existence, make your site a member of the ring. Once your site is added to the ring, you will get an e-mail with a few HTML codes that are to be pasted on a page in your site to generate a control panel for the web ring. Through this panel, which has got links to move from one site to the other in the web ring, a visitor can travel all or any of the sites in your ring. The RingSurf service also provides the required tools that let you or anybody else to automatically add web sites to the ring.

The Rail

The Rail is another service that behaves almost like a web ring. The service claims that they are creating a railroad across the Net - a web visitor can travel by any of the trains created by the service depending on his/her intended destination. For example, if you access the 'Electric Train', you will be traveling along the high-tech streets that contain sites related to electronics, computers and web. All along this web railway you will encounter sites with rail icon and to get transported to the next site (station) from the current site you just need to click at this rail icon. If interested in this innovative site, check out the link at: therail.com.

There are many other sites that help a netizen create/manage web rings like Webring.org (webring.org) of Yahoo, Page-ring.com: page-ring.com/ and Ringlink - stardust.ovh.org/.

Here is an excellent page that contains links to a few IT related web rings: damnputers.com/webrings.shtml

Legal experts, this way: The Net, which has made national boundaries irrelevant poses a major challenge to the lawmakers. Unless there is a proper law to deal with cyber terrorism, Net cracking and other kinds of illegal activities on the Net world, it will be difficult for the e-business to take off. The branch of law that deals with the unique legal issues of the Net world is known as Cyberlaw. If you want to keep abreast with the developments in this branch of law, access the link: CyberlawInformer.com and subscribe to the newsletter 'Cyberlaw informer'

Update: Steganography

One way to send a secret information is to send it after encryption using some encryption tools. Though it is difficult to read an encrypted document, it gives a direct hint to others that some secret document has arrived; perhaps it may attract the attention of some hacker who is proficient in breaking codes and ultimately the code may be broken. In this situations,

Steganographic tools come to our rescue. Stenographic tools - discussed in this column on March 1 - allow you to hide your data file in a file that is in no way related to the information being sent. The data can be hidden in a picture file, sound file or a web page.

Nobody will suspect that a secret information is lying hidden in the picture file arrived in your mailbox, which when viewed through a normal reader just displays the picture. If your are interested in a cute stenographic tool, access the site: filesplitter.8m.com/ and download the program 'Smart Seal' written by two young programmers.

J. Murali

(The author can be contacted at murali27@satyam.net.in)

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