thank you for your interest. before anything else, please browse the ring, and we’d suggest starting from the beginning. the sites nearest to amrita.town are a good place to get a feel for what this is.
a webring only makes sense once you’ve travelled it. follow the links from one site to the next and keep going until you’ve seen enough. this isn’t a formality, it’s the only real way to know whether your site belongs here. the ring is its own description, and we can’t write a better one.
this is a ring of personal websites. that sounds simple until you try to pin it down, so we won’t pin it down too far, but here’s the shape of it.
think of a personal website less as a thing you publish once and more as a garden you keep. some people tend a big one, some a small one; some are meticulous, some let it grow a little wild. what makes it a garden is that someone cares for it over time, adds to it, changes it, lets it reflect where they are right now. it’s not laid down once and left.
what grows in it is up to you. writing about what you’re thinking about, what you noticed, what you made and why; things you’re learning; things you keep coming back to. some of it rough, some of it careful, all of it you. when you land on a site like that, you get a sense of someone, not a résumé, not a portfolio, not a landing page for a brand of oneself. a person.
it doesn’t need to be hand-built. a site built on a template that someone has made their own, filled with their writing, their choices, their care, is just as much a garden. and there’s a particular kind of joy in the ones that are built by hand: the arts-and-crafts web, the cutesy and the weird, the residues of the 90s and early 2000s, pages that feel like someone arranged every pixel on purpose. a myspace page or a tumblr could be a personal website too, even if it isn’t quite indie. none of this is required. but if that handmade spirit is where your heart is, you’ll feel very at home here.
if you’d like to see more of what this can look like, beyond our own ring, neocities and the indieweb club bangalore are good places to wander. the latter has a lot of wonderful sites with a few mixed entries, so treat it as a sampler rather than a standard.
what tends not to fit is the opposite of all this: something put up once and not returned to, where the writing could have come from anyone, or where the whole thing is mostly a list of projects and links you could find on github or linkedin. none of these on their own are disqualifications, we’re not ticking boxes, but if that’s mostly what your site is, you’ll probably sense yourself that it isn’t quite the shape we’re describing.
and a garden is alive. not updated every day, some of our favourite sites here only change a few times a year, but there should be signs someone is still there. a blog with one placeholder post, or a site that’s been quietly the same since the day it went up, is hard to come back to.
read everything above. genuinely, go around the ring first.
make sure your website has contact details somewhere, and an RSS feed if you have a blog.
add these links to your website. most people put it in the footer, but presentation is up to you. just make sure it’s easily accessible.
<!-- example (you can show these 4 links however you want) -->
<div>
<a href="https://amrita.town">amrita.town</a>
<a href="https://amrita.town/prev">← prev</a>
<a href="https://amrita.town/random">⚄ random</a>
<a href="https://amrita.town/next">next →</a>
</div>note: if your website is not on the root path, add a site query
parameter to each URL like this,
https://amrita.town/next?site=example.com/mypath.
send a pr to add yourself to src/members.json on our
github.
we’ll take a look. if it’s a fit, welcome to amrita.town, and if not, it’s nothing personal; this ring is just a particular shape, and there are plenty of gardens out there.
we’re looking forward to seeing what you’ve made.