Worse, there are all kinds of leeches to bleed the unwary. If you like wordpress, you can build your own: then find the time you used to spend creating content, as and when you wished, is spent instead patching and repairing at the insistence and the timing of the wordpress cuckoo. That’s another reason why is a static site: I tried drupal and I almost drowned in site–breaking obligatory patches before I rowed back. There wasn’t anything especially wrong with drupal, indeed wordpress had a worse reputation at the time, it’s just that I want to spend what spare time I have available, when it is available, working on content, not fixing someone else’s software.

So all this convinces me that most of the early personal web sites will long since have died. Most of those left will be corpses that the internet’s undertakers have forgotten to bury.

But I have hope. DMOZ might have died, but it might phoenix into curlie. Stumble Upon is back under the control of its original creator. Duck Duck Go might only return failed marketing companies when searched for personal websites, but it returns real results amongst the junk when searching for personal home pages. I will find like–minded site creators yet!