La Gazette de l'Anneau des
Français de l'étranger

Patrie WebRing/NetRing News

For better or worse, the WebRing system (which has been powering the "Français de l'étanger" ring) is now fully integrated with Yahoo! since September 5, 2000. At the very bottom of this page, you may see the new "Server Side Navigation Bar" (SSNB) which Yahoo! now virtually imposes on the sites of all new WebRing members (read on for a way to work around this limitation).
Just above the SSNB are the two slim navigation bars which we have been using so far. On October 16, 2000, Yahoo announced that these would continue to work indefinitely. Prior to that statement however, things were not at all so clear (to say the least) and we had already arranged to keep our unobtrusive bars by registering "Français de l'étranger" with another organization (RingSurf) very similar to what WebRing used to be, before the Yahoo! takeover. This is why you may also see two new navigation bars on this page, which are so similar to the old ones that you may have trouble telling them apart at first (the word "WebRing" changes to "NetRing" and the "Next" button turns from blue to purple). After Yahoo!'s Oct. 16 announcement, our intentions are to keep the Ring registered with both organizations indefinitely...

In other words, "Français de l'étranger" is now a ring with a split personality: It actually consists of two separate rings(a "WebRing" and a "NetRing") with a number of sites belonging to both! This ensures a maximum of exposure to our member sites, while allowing individual WebMasters to choose exactly how they want to participate in the "combined" ring. There are several options:

• If you join both the (new) "NetRing" and the (old) "WebRing", you should put the NetRing navigation bar ABOVE the "WebRing" bar(s) of this ring or of any other WebRing you may belong to (this is a now a technical requirement to avoid a glitch which should be fixed some time in the future). If you use WebRing's SSNB, we strongly recommend that you put it at the very bottom of your page (just before the </BODY> tag), or else anything that follows it will be hidden from your visitors whenever Yahoo!'s WebRing system is down.
• If you join only the "NetRing", you will have a slim bar which you may put anywhere on your page and whose many functions are not scheduled to disappear anytime soon.
• If you join only the "WebRing", we recommend that you use the SSNB (although it is still possible to have the slim version, by using the "trick" described below) which you should put at the very bottom of the page, for the reason stated above. One advantage of the SSNB is that, once it is installed, you may have your page join as many Yahoo! WebRings as you like without ever touching the HTML code on your page. Additional links corresponding to whatever rings you join will appear automatically as soon as you are approved for membership in them!

Join our WebRing   (Yahoo!) Join our NetRing (RingSurf)

If you joined "Français de l'étranger" WebRing before September 1, 2000,

You may keep our old navigation bars which will still work indefinitely. However, if you want to install the SSNB or otherwise update the information about your Site, Yahoo! now requires that you use a Yahoo!ID to link your Site to. This Yahoo!ID will appear next to the title of your site in the "Français de l'étranger" index. With this in mind, you may update your Site by providing your login information below (you will then be asked to either sign up for a new Yahoo! ID or use an existing one to proceed).

Although your site is not yet active in it! All the information that was registered with your site in August 2000 (including your password) has been transferred to the new system. Your Site ID is the same in either system (which may not be the case for sites joining after September 2000). To activate your site in the new ring, we just need you to let us know if/when you have installed the NetRing HTML fragment. If you want to view/edit the information about or site in the new system, you may log in below.

RingID    SiteID    Password    

The bulky (430 by 86 pixels) SSNB is an optional replacement for either of our own bars, which are shown below and offer more features in a footprint over 3 times smaller (469 or 471 by 25 pixels). In addition, the SSNB will not show up if the WebRing system is not online. In such a case, the portion of the page below the SSNB will not appear either; it is therefore prudent to put the SSNB only at the very bottom of the page. (Our slim navigation bars do not have any such restrictions, since they don't use any external resources, graphical or otherwise.)

Once you have joined Yahoo!'s WebRing and installed your own SSNB, you may easily determine what "Site ID" you have been assigned by the system. For example, "20" is the Site ID of the page you are now reading (which was registered after September 5, 2000), because that's the number you read within the string that appears in your browser's status bar when you mouse over the item "Next >>" in the SSNB (try this now).
In Yahoo!'s new system you do not need to worry about your Site ID at all. However, you may want to know that it can be used to build an "old-style" navigation bar suitable for your own site. Look at the end of the HTML source code of this page for inspiration: Just replace the 7 occurrences of "id=20;" by your own ID thus determined. Also, replace the word "Gazette" by any local title you like. (Just make sure not to use any space in such a title. Instead, insert the 3 characters "%20" to separate words.) Of course, if you like it so much to have a slim navigation bar (and nothing else) on your site, you may consider joining the new RingSurf-hosted version of the "Français de l'étranger" ring... Joining RingSurf's NetRing is also your best option if you expect a number of visitors with older browsers (which do not support JavaScript).