What a webring is
A webring links independent websites into a single circular chain. Every member site carries a small navigation strip — usually Next, Previous, and Random — that points to its neighbors in the ring. Follow the Next links from any starting point and you travel member to member around the entire loop until you arrive back where you began. There is no central hierarchy and no algorithm deciding what you see: just one enthusiast's site handing you off to the next, the way a good host introduces you around a party.
Before search engines indexed everything, rings were how communities of hobbyists found one another. They were curated, human, and generous — qualities worth preserving even now. You can read more about the history of the Ring on our about page.
How to travel The Smoke Ring
The classic ring navigation offered several ways to move:
- Next — go to the following barbecue site in the ring.
- Previous — step back to the site before this one.
- Skip Next / Skip Previous — hop over a site if one is temporarily down.
- Next 5 — jump ahead five sites to cover ground faster.
- Random Site — our favorite: get whisked to a member site at random and discover something new.
The joy of the ring is serendipity. Hit Random a few times and you might land on a champion competition team, a backyard tinkerer's smoker-build photo diary, a family recipe archive, or a supplier of rare smoking woods — connections you would never have made through a search box.
The neighborhood
Every site in the ring shares one thing: a genuine love of barbecue. Some are polished, some are wonderfully homemade, but all of them earned their place by being real contributions to the barbecue web. Browse the full member list to see who is in the neighborhood, and if you run a barbecue site yourself, learn how to join the ring and add your own stop on the loop.
However you travel it — in order, five at a time, or purely at random — welcome to the ride. Keep clicking Next, and you will always find your way home.