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:
* Xah Lee