The vault · 23
Link to Us: Buttons, Banners and Webrings
The old depot had a page that existed only to be helpful about its own promotion: pre-made banners, a suggested blurb, and instructions for the 88x31 button. A whole folk art of linking grew around pages like it.
At linktous.asp, the old depot did something that looks strange from the present: it politely instructed visitors in how to advertise it. A page of pre-made banners, a text blurb ready to copy, HTML fragments with the IMG tag pre-written. Nothing about it was unusual; nearly every independent site ran one, because in the link economy described in the directory chapter, being easy to link was survival, and hoping was not a strategy.
01The 88x31 button
The community settled on a standard micro-banner, 88 pixels wide by 31 tall, small enough to sit in a sidebar row of a dozen neighbours without offending anyone's modem. The format was a genuine folk art form: gradients bevelled like brass plaques, one-word promises, drop shadows applied with conviction. A good button was legible at a glance and fit the aesthetic of a movement that believed software could be friendly, the same conviction that built the tools described in the history.
02Rings and exchanges
Two distribution machines grew around the button. The webring chained member sites in a loop: a nav bar on each member page offering previous, next and random, so a reader interested in, say, VB tutorials could wander the entire neighbourhood without a search engine. The banner exchange was the same idea with accounting: show two banners on your site, earn one impression of yours elsewhere. Both were volunteer infrastructure moving real traffic, and both dissolved when centralised platforms made ambient discovery free and the ambient worthless.
The modern depot keeps one line of the old page's spirit: if you run a site about programming history and want to point here, link the front page with whatever words suit your house style. No banner required; the advertising vault explains why there is nothing to trade.
03The blurb as a genre
Every link-to-us page offered a suggested description, and the genre's conventions were strict: one sentence, factual, mildly proud, no adjectives that could be falsified. Reading a dozen of them in the archive is a small education in pre-platform voice, the sound of small publishers describing themselves plainly because no algorithm was going to do it for them. The descendant of the blurb is the meta description tag, and the depot still writes its own, visible in any page source, including the about page this magazine inherits the custom from.
04The blurb, still practised
Three sites that still introduce themselves the old way, plainly and in their own words, which is precisely what made a site easy to link to in 1999 and still does.
- Discus le bureau des choix web · a French desk that writes down what it does before it writes down what it sells, the 1999 blurb convention exactly.
- création de site internet · the trade that inherited the job the link-to-us page used to do for its owner, now done to order.
- reprogrammationmoteurlyon · a one-trade workshop whose name is its entire blurb, an economy the button era would have admired.
Continue through the depot
