What happened to Tiny Rooms

I started the Tiny Rooms Ring in the fall of 1997 with nine pages, all people I'd met on a miniatures mailing list. By the next summer we had thirty-eight. I kept the hub page, I checked every site once a month, and I answered every letter. It was a couple of hours a week and I loved it.

Then last fall my mother got sick, and I took on extra hours at work to cover the trips back and forth to see her. Something had to give, and it was the ring. I told myself I'd catch up in a month. It was five.

When I finally sat down in March and went round the ring, nine of the thirty-eight pages had moved or disappeared, and four more had taken the ring box off. Anybody who started at my hub and clicked Next hit a dead end within three or four clicks. I had letters from strangers asking if the ring was broken. It was. I spent two weekends trying to fix it, and eleven of my members' e-mail addresses bounced. My hub was listing pages that weren't there, for people I couldn't reach.

In April I wrote to everyone I could, thanked them, pointed them at other rings, and closed it. My mother is doing much better, thank you. The ring isn't coming back. But everything I learned is below, so yours can outlive a bad winter.

Before you start one

• Look for a ring that already exists. If there's a good one on your subject, join it and help the ringmaster instead. The world doesn't need two half-kept rings about the same thing.
• Pick a subject you'll still care about in two years. Narrow enough to mean something, wide enough to find ten pages.
• Get a second ringmaster. This is the one I'd tell my younger self if I could tell her only one thing. Somebody who has the list, the rules and the password, and who can take over for a month when life happens.

What you'll need

• A hub page with the members listed in ring order, a line about each one, your rules, how to join, and your e-mail address.
• A ring button, 88 by 31 pixels and small on the disk. Every member's page will load it, so keep it light.
• The ring box itself: the code on Part One will do.
• A member list in one place, on paper or in a file: each member's name, e-mail, page address, the date they joined, and who their neighbors are. When mine fell apart, half of this was in old e-mails I'd deleted.

Adding a member, the hand-run way

On a hand-run ring, like mine was and like the ones in the neighborhoods here, you are the machinery. New members go in at the end of the circle, just before it comes back around to the first page. That means three pages change:

1. The new member's page. You send them their box, with the old last page as their Prev and the first page as their Next.
2. The old last page. Its Next has to change to the new member. Write to that member and ask them to change it.
3. The first page. Its Prev has to change to the new member. If the first page is your own, as it usually is, fix it yourself.

Then add the new member to the bottom of the hub list. Taking somebody off is the same thing backward: their two neighbors get each other's addresses, and you take them off the hub.

There are services out on the Web that run the Next and Prev links through a program on their own computers, so nobody's box ever has to change. If your ring grows big, that's worth looking into. But a hand-run ring is friendlier, and the ringmaster knows every page on it, and I'd still rather run one that way.

The monthly walk

Pick a day, the first Sunday of the month, say, and put it on the calendar. Start at your hub, click Next all the way round, and keep your member list next to you. At each page, check three things:

1. Is the page still there?
2. Is the ring box still on it?
3. Do its Prev and Next go where your list says they should?

With thirty-eight pages it took me about two hours with a cup of tea. When something's wrong, write to that member the same day. Give them two weeks. If you don't hear back, take them off and patch their neighbors. It feels unkind. It isn't. The kind thing is a ring that goes all the way round.

A ringmaster's promises

I managed the first three for a year and a half. I never did the fourth, and that's why the fifth came so hard. Learn from me.