Extremely excited to announce that mataroa.blog now has a webring integration!
One can add two URLs: "next" and "previous", and become part of the arcane technique of decentralised content discovery.
Start your ring
Update May 2021: This tool no longer works due to the new referrer policies by Chrome and Firefox.
Max Böck made a nice Webring Kit that enables dynamic next/previous webring links, so that one does not have to manually edit those on their website. Adds a bit of centralisation but makes it much easier to manage.
The kit uses the Eleventy static site generator and is configured to deploy on Netlify. Get started here.
Revival
The need for webrings stemmed during the 90s when there was no Google and search engines were inefficient in helping people discover web content.
The need re-arises in 2020, when search engines are influenced by SEO techniques and content platforms have become silos. These days, an indie web revival would be incredible.
A webring has a specific theme, and the links that comprise it are curated. Manually curating a webring's content means that it has been agreed that the website's content is relevant to the webring's theme. The modern web approach would be to add a neural network to figure out the website's theme, but that would be totally not fly!
See also
- https://www.sonniesedge.net/posts/webrings/
- https://bryanlrobinson.com/blog/bring-fansites-back-to-the-web/
- https://indieweb.org/
- https://indieweb.org/Webmention
- https://awesomeblog.club/
- https://blogs.sirodoht.com/
- https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring
- https://neocities.org/
- https://href.cool/
- https://weirdwidewebring.net/
- https://webring.xxiivv.com/