In every house I've ever loved, the kitchen table is where things happen. It's where you cook, where you eat, where you shell the peas and sort the beans, where you cut out a dress pattern or piece a quilt, where the children do their homework and the grown-ups drink coffee and settle the world's problems. So when my granddaughter showed me how home pages could be hooked together in a ring, that's the name I wanted.

The Kitchen Table WebRing is a ring of home pages about the things people make at home: cooking and baking, growing vegetables and flowers, sewing and quilting and crafts, and generally keeping a house and raising a family. I'm Rosa M., from Fresno, California, and I started the ring in March of 1999 with three sites: mine, my friend Betty's garden page, and Miss Odette in New Orleans, who I've never met but who I feel like I've known all my life. We're nine now, from Louisiana to Oregon, and we have room at the table for more.

How it works: Every member page has the Kitchen Table box near the bottom. Click Next to go to the next site on the ring, Prev to go back one, or List Sites to come here. It goes around in a circle, so start anywhere and you'll see everybody. After the last site you're back at the first, like passing the plates around the table.

Nine sites as of September 1999. Start at the top and go around.

We'd love to have you. Here's what we ask:

1. Your page should be about making a home. Cooking, baking, gardening, canning, sewing, quilting, knitting, crafts, keeping house, raising kids, that kind of thing. It can be a personal page or a small family business, as long as the page itself is mostly about the subject and not just an advertisement.
2. Family-friendly only. My grandchildren click through this ring and so do other people's. If you wouldn't put it on the refrigerator, don't put it on the ring. Nothing rude, nothing mean, no bad language. I'm the ringmaster and I'll take a site off the ring if I have to, but I've never had to.
3. Your page should be finished enough to visit. A little "under construction" is fine, we all have that, but there should be something to read.
4. E-mail the ringmaster (that's me) at [email protected] with your name, your page's address and title, and a sentence about what it's about. My granddaughter Cristina reads me the mail on Sundays, so give us a week.
5. Paste the ring code (below) at the bottom of your page. I'll write back and tell you which sites are your Prev and Next, and you fill those in. Once it's up and I've checked that the links work, I'll add you to the list on this page and tell your neighbors on the ring to update their links. Then you're on.

Please keep the ring box where people can find it, near the bottom of your main page, and please don't change the words in it. The ring only works if everybody's box points to the right places, so if you ever move your page or take it down, e-mail me first so I can fix the chain.

Copy this into your page just above your counter or your e-mail link. Put your own name where it says YOUR NAME, and put the addresses I send you where it says PREV and NEXT. The button () is already on the GeoCities.us server, so you don't have to download anything.

Here's what it looks like on my page:

Other rings on GeoCities.us, if your page is about something else: the Front Porch WebRing for family home pages, the Backroads WebRing for travel and cars and the outdoors, and the Stage Door WebRing for music, theater and the arts. Or go see the whole neighborhood directory.