I've set up something I call a global ring return page which should be able to get you back to your ring, which should be able to get you back to your ring, even if you wander onto another one of my sites. This is part of something I call "better than total webring navigability", that grew out of the recognition that the creation of the cloud had made the notion of a "website" a fuzzier one than it used to be.

If one has embedded photos from one's Flickr photostream on one's blog, with the required links to one's photo pages, but with no links back to the ring from Flickr, then one might meet the requirements of total webring navigability, if a site is seen as being only the pages on a given subdomain, but something is clearly missing. That Flickr account functions as a part of one's site, and should be seen as such, I think. So I treat is as such, placing links back to the ring on my Flickr profile and homegroups (bloglike groups where I discuss my photos), as well as on the social media pages associated with my site. To avoid creating navigational confusion, I then make a point of keeping the collection of pages in the cloud associated with the different pages placed on Flickr mutually disjoint. Thus, my Youtube channel, Flickr account, real time Typepad microblog, etc., are all treated as being part of my blog, ring return links going back to the ring return page for that blog, and I make a special point of not linking from any of these to Chicago Parks and Gardens. Even if your sense of what the boundaries of a site might be fuzzy, your sense of which fuzzy site you're on won't be, and you'll know exactly how to get back to where you're supposed to be.

That doesn't mean that I start ignoring the other pages on my site. It just means that they have their own distinct clouds, if they are connected to content in the cloud, at all. I'll be creating some Squidoo pages for Chicago Parks and Gardens, which as you've probably guessed, I'm planning to eventually spin off and make into its own site, after it grows large enough to be its own site. Thus the added virtue of keeping those clouds distinct. I'll use one Squidoo membership for pages associated associated with my Yelp account and Typepad / Posterous blog, and another for Chicago parks and Gardens, so that you can't go wrong, even by clicking on the link to my Squidoo profile - that, too, will have the needed link back to the ring. As that page grows and splits off, a mess will thus be avoided: disentangling pages is not easy once they've become entangled, and one's visitors will be getting lost while one is in the middle of such a task, presenting us with a lose-lose proposition.

Having done so, I still do have links between my different sites. Yes, "site" is a vague word, as is "page", for reasons not of my making - many people have used those two words interchangeably, or used the word "site" for a number of different things, such as the subdomain on a server used by an individual subscriber to a website hosting service (somebody's "site") and membership on an individual ring (a "site" on a ring). So I'll define my words, as precisely as the fuzzy circumstances allow. A "page", for my purposes, is a single .html file and associated media, something on which everything can be reached through scrolling without any use of hyperlinks or entry of data into the address bar. A "site" is the entirety of a single subdomain or domain under the user's control. This leaves us in need of a word for that network made up of a site and its supporting social media and other pages so closely tied in as to function as one unit with the site, something functionally inseparable from the site. Let's call it a "weblocale", a locale being


"1: a place or locality especially when viewed in relation to a particular event or characteristic

2: site, scene


It will do as well as anything else. OK, then, I have some links between my different weblocales. I am careful to mark them as offsite links in the title tags, while the visitor will see if he brings his cursor up to one of the links, but still, people will wander, and as a member of the ring making a good faith effort to honor his obligations to the ring, I'd like to help them find their way back. Hence the "global ring return page", something that offers webring navigability for the site that results, if we regard all of the pages on my cluster of sites as being part of one huge site.

That's taking webring navigability a bit further than generally intended, "total webring navigability" only referring to navigability within a domain or subdomain, hence the phrase "greater than total webring navigability", as self-contradictory as that sounds.

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