In praise of .. personal websites

2012-05-05

There's a particular sort of self-publishing that I think is a Good Thing, which is the personal homepages of iconoclasts. These always seem to eschew off-the-shelf Content Management Systems, which of course basically didn't exist in the 1990s when a lot of these sites first sprang up, and they're not maintained by the sort of people who'd use someone else's CMS anyway.

Over time, the sites gather a collection of essays and other amusing and diverting or informative material on a range of slightly connected topics; there's a selection effect here - if your opinions are conventional or not worth sharing, you don't have a website for offering them to others.

Before the internet, these people would be the local village oddity - now everyone gets to appreciate them.

Here's a representative sample of my favourites:

* Justin B Rye

* Mark Rosenfelder

* Nikolai Bezroukov

* Xah Lee