For Interbase WebRing users.

    Here I will put the description: the Interbase WebRing is for anybody interested in having a ring of sites dedicated to Interbase. You may be a VAR, an independent developer or a third party package developer; as long as you have products and ALSO offer valuable documentation or case studies on Interbase or have freeware, you are welcome to join this effort. Also, if you run an email list or a newsgroup with free assistance for IB questions, you are welcome, too.

There's no fee to be a member. There's no special obligation. Only requirement is you have something valuable to offer to the community for free. For example, I don't worry if you run your own business as long as you have one or two freeware decent tools, for example. Contrarily, if you only want to publicize your company and have nothing to donate, then look elsewhere, please.

Assuming you are clear on the requirements, you should fill in this brief questionnaire to request your addition to the ring. Go (or come back if you came from there) to this URL:

and click on GET STARTED. You'll be asked to create a user ID. WebRing is again independent of Yahoo!

If you are accepted, you will receive a confirmation. You'll receive an HTML fragment (template) but please (although the automatic response when you submit a request to join says another thing) put it in your site AFTER the confirmation: I will evaluate your site before accepting it.

If you don't get such template even after your confirmation, please go to

and input your User ID and your password. (You got the User ID when you requested the addition to the WebRing and your site was queued.) Press SIGN IN, then edit your site and click on "Get Navigation Code" and scroll to see the HTML fragment you need. See other WebRings as an example. Copy and paste the code in HTML mode; otherwise it may be mangled to be displayed as text. Beware that some editors may want to outsmart you assuming you want to paste text and not raw HTML.

Be warned I do not tolerate SPAM sites, SCAM sites nor WAREZ sites in the ring, because I want to keep serious about the main focus: Interbase.

I want to state clearly that I reserve the right to accept or reject a site. I perform a subjective evaluation of the applicant sites, based on the real free support they bring to the IB community. While seasoned, long-term IB users probably know where to go, newcomers must be given really useful sites and not bullshit. This is specially important now that IB goes Open Source. I will repeat, this means useful free utilities, IB documents translated to the native language of the site's country or in English (that aren't plain copies of the originals at IB's official site or links to documents/utilities on other sites), thorough case studies, active and helpful newsgroups and other things that I may forget at this time.

Finally, you must be aware that's being part of the webRing imply some basic obligations: you should comply with requirements of webring.com itself and also, you should keep the material that allowed you to enter the Interbase WebRing and you should put in the registered page the so called "HTML fragment" that's the HTML code snippet that let visitors of your site to go to another site in the same WebRing. After all, if others are referencing you, why you can't do the same. If you do not include such link, you're breaking the ring. I assume you have IB related content because you know a bit about IB, so let me say you that webring.com has a "garbage collector" that runs on a weekly basis and scan sites in each webRing. If one site is found without its "HTML fragment", it will be removed automatically by the so called Ring Checker and put in the Queue as it was when you submitted it. This means you will get out of the ring. Ultimately, it's your decision, but I assume you wanted to be in the ring, so don't complain that you didn't know: when you submit your site, you are given the HTML fragment to copy and paste in your site.

Forced by circumstances, I've decided to add (or to make explicit) two minor requirements that (at leas for me) are obvious. First, the site should be online 24x7; I won't accept sites hosted on a home machine with a dialup connection or a server using a cable modem way to the Internet that is turned on only some hours a day. If you have something free to offer to the IB community, then please look for one of the hundreds free web hosting sites on the Internet that are working all the time: there's nothing more frustrating that clicking on an hyperlink that never works. And I won't stop you to put a link to your home-hosted site if you want while you keep the IB content on a true Internet web server. Second, I request that the email used for the administrator of the node that intends to join the WebRing be an active account and not an account that's never read. I only seldom contact the ring's members but if the need to get in touch with them should arise, I want to be sure my message will be read in a prudent time frame: perhaps a week is still acceptable; but a month is definitely out of reasonable and practical limits. This has an obvious implication: if I receive a submission and I don't find merits to put the submitted site in the WebRing, I will contact the administrator to request more information but if I get no response in 5 workdays as a maximum, I will ignore and delete the request.

This page was last updated on 2001-12-08 20:08:05