A hand-collected directory of personal homepages, text-heavy sites, and corners of the internet that predate or reject the modern web.
Maintained by nobody in particular. Last substantially updated: who knows.
This is a list of personal websites. Not portfolios. Not landing pages. Not "content platforms." Websites. Places where a person has put down things they know or think or have done, in text, without much concern for whether it looks good on a phone.
I've organised it loosely. The categories are rough. Several sites belong in multiple places. I've put them where they felt most at home. Links marked like this were dead at last check. I leave them in because someone else might find a mirror or an archive. Links marked NEW were added in the last time I touched this file.
Some of these I read. Some I found once and kept. Some were recommended to me. This directory has no submission process. Email me if you think something belongs here and I might add it eventually.
"I want to find all the cozy corners of the old web and catalogue them before they disappear." -- someone on Usenet, 1998, approximately. I don't remember who.
Places where people of this general tendency gather or find each other.
| neocities.org | Free static hosting in the tradition of GeoCities. The largest single gathering of hand-made personal websites currently active. Browse by tag: retro, linux, programming, personal. | hub |
| tildeverse.org | A loose confederation of shared Unix servers where people have shell accounts and personal homepages. The right idea. Properly old-fashioned. | community |
| tilde.club | The original modern tilde. Paul Ford started it in 2014. "Not a social network. One tiny totally standard unix computer that people respectfully use together." Still running. | tilde |
| tilde.town | Collaborative, creative, slightly weirder than tilde.club. Good people. Strong community feeling. Homepage directory worth browsing. | tilde |
| ctrl-c.club | Free SSH and web accounts. Lean into it: build a webpage, play text games, learn something. | tilde |
| 32bit.cafe | Community for independent web builders. Forum, resources, encouragement. The right attitude about what the web could be. | community |
| 32bit.cafe resources | Their compiled resource list for personal web builders. Bookmarks for tools, tutorials, hosting, inspiration. Dense and useful. | resources |
| indieweb.org | Own your content, own your identity. More principled about it than most. The wiki is enormous. | community |
| sdf.org | Public access Unix system. Been running since 1987. That's not a typo. Member pages, gopher, everything. | unix / hub |
| news.ycombinator.com | Yes it's Hacker News. Listed here because the "Show HN: my personal site" threads are a reliable way to find interesting people's homepages. Use the search. | hub |
| lobste.rs | Invite-only link aggregator. Higher signal than HN on technical topics. People's profiles often link to personal sites. | hub |
| marginalia.nu | Search engine specifically for non-commercial, text-heavy, old-web-style content. If you want to find sites like the ones on this list, search here first. | search |
| wiby.me | Search engine for the "old web." Indexes simple, text-based pages. Surprise button shows you a random indexed site. Good for an hour of wandering. | search |
People who understand what's actually happening when a program runs.
| catb.org/~esr/ | Eric S. Raymond. Hacker, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and The Art of Unix Programming. Opinionated. Prolific. Site has been up a long time. Much to read. | unix / writing |
| joelonsoftware.com | Joel Spolsky's essays on software development. The early archive especially. His piece on leaky abstractions is worth reading by anyone who writes software professionally. | programming |
| harmful.cat-v.org | cat -v considered harmful. Collection of writing about software complexity, bad design, and things that should be avoided. Strong opinions, mostly right. | unix / rants |
| dwheeler.com | David Wheeler. Open source, security, software development. Dense with useful material. Long essays. Not trying to be popular. | unix / security |
| landley.net | Rob Landley. Linux, toybox, system programming. The FAQ page alone is worth reading. Not updated constantly but what's there is substantive. | linux |
| nullprogram.com | Chris Wellons. Low-level programming, C, Emacs, performance. Technical blog. One of the better ones. Posts are long and the content earns the length. | C / systems |
| brendangregg.com | Brendan Gregg. Linux performance analysis. The person who wrote the book, literally. Site is a resource as much as a homepage. Flame graphs came from here. | linux / perf |
| jvns.ca | Julia Evans. Systems internals, explained without assuming you already know. Comics and long posts. Genuinely useful rather than just impressive. | systems |
| cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/ | Robert Harper. Types, programming languages, Standard ML. Academic but the writing is clear. The page looks like a faculty page from 1998. Appropriate. | pl theory |
| usenix.org/login | USENIX ;login: magazine. Technical. Serious. The community that kept Unix alive when it needed keeping. | unix |
| unixsheikh.com | Opinions about Unix, BSD, and the sorry state of modern Linux. Plainly written. Not everyone will agree. Worth reading anyway. | unix / opinions |
| bsdhowto.ch | BSD-focused technical writing. Text-heavy. Practical. The kind of site that exists to be useful rather than to be found. | BSD |
| drewdevault.com | Drew DeVault. Linux, open source, simplicity. Sometimes abrasive. Usually right. Sourcehut and Wayland work came from here. | linux / oss |
People who think about how programs are written, not just that they run.
| paulgraham.com | Paul Graham. Lisp, startups, essays on thinking. The early Lisp essays especially. The site looks like it was made in 2001 and has not been updated since, which is correct behaviour. | lisp / writing |
| blog.veitheller.de | Veit Heller. Programming languages, Carp, strange projects. Dense technical posts. The kind of programmer who builds the tools rather than uses them. | pl / lisp |
| perlis quotes | Alan Perlis epigrams. 130 one-line observations about programming from 1982. Still largely correct. Memorise twenty of them. | classic |
| akkartik.name | Kartik Agaram. Bootstrapping, simplicity, readable programs. Working on Mu and related projects. Writes thoughtfully about what software could be. | simplicity |
| oilshell.org/blog/ | Andy Chu. Building a better shell (Oil Shell / Oils). Very long posts. The kind of technical depth that's rare. Reads the specs others don't bother with. | shell / pl |
| andrewkelley.me | Andrew Kelley. Creator of Zig. Writes about systems programming and language design. Personal site. Actual opinions. | zig / systems |
| teamten.com/lawrence/ | Lawrence Kesteloot. Emulators, programming history, personal projects. Old-web feel. Long archive going back years. Breadth is impressive. | retrocomp |
| prog21.dadgum.com | James Hague. Programming, game development, thinking about software. Stopped posting but the archive is good. "Purely functional retrogames" piece is a favourite. | programming |
| 250bpm.com | Martin Sustrik. Distributed systems, concurrency, low-level design. Creator of ZeroMQ and nanomsg. Writes long, careful technical essays. | distributed |
| scattered-thoughts.net | Jamie Brandon. Databases, languages, research. Very technical. Dense posts. Good reference for anyone working in the same areas. | databases / pl |
| fabiensanglard.net | Fabien Sanglard. Code reviews of classic games: Quake, Doom, Wolf3D. Extremely detailed. Treats old game source code as literature worth studying. | retrocode |
| justine.lol | Justine Tunney. Cosmopolitan libc, Actually Portable Executable, and other deranged useful projects. The engineering posts are extraordinary. | C / systems |
| complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/ | Anton Ertl. FORTH, compiler engineering, Gforth. Academic personal page. Last updated irregularly. Good resource for anyone interested in FORTH seriously. | forth / compilers |
| eev.ee | Eevee. Games, Python, web, opinions on everything. Long posts, personal voice, interesting range. Updated when there's something to say. | general |
| blog.regehr.org | John Regehr. Embedded systems, compilers, undefined behaviour in C. The undefined behaviour posts are required reading for anyone who writes C and thinks they understand it. | C / compilers |
People for whom precision is not optional.
| johndcook.com | John Cook. Applied maths, statistics, programming. Regular short posts. Years of archives. The kind of blog that makes you think something small every day. | maths / stats |
| mathwithbaddrawings.com | Ben Orlin. Mathematics explained through deliberately terrible drawings. Accessible but not dumbed down. The book is also good. | maths |
| terrytao.wordpress.com | Terence Tao's blog. Fields Medal winner writing about mathematics. Sometimes accessible, sometimes not. The expository posts are remarkable. | maths |
| cut-the-knot.org | Alexander Bogomolny's maths site. Interactive proofs, puzzles, geometry. One of the oldest continuously-running maths education sites. Dense with material. | maths |
| inference-review.com | Serious essays on mathematics, physics, biology. Long-form. Not dumbed down. Reads like a journal from someone who cares about the ideas. | science / essays |
| math.utah.edu/~pa/ | Peter Alfeld's personal maths page. Faculty homepage. Old format. Links to notes on various topics. The kind of page that's been quietly useful for 25 years. | maths |
| azimuthproject.org | John Baez. Applied maths, category theory, climate. Very long-running blog. Baez is one of the better mathematical writers. | maths / science |
People who remember what worked and refuse to pretend it didn't.
| vintage-computer.com | Forums and resources for vintage computer preservation. Everything from MITS Altair to mid-90s machines. Active community. | retrocomp |
| classiccmp.org | Classic Computer Preservation Society. Mailing lists, archives, documentation. Old-school organisation doing actual preservation work. | preservation |
| bitsavers.org | Scanned manuals, technical documentation, and software for vintage computers. One of the most useful archives of this type. Enormous. | archive |
| floodgap.com/retrobits/ | Cameron Kaiser. Retrocomputing projects, Commodore, classic Mac. Also runs the Floodgap gopher server and the only gopher proxy most people use. | retrocomp |
| theregister.com | Linked not for The Register generally but for the specific 2003 piece about Unix greybeards. Required reading for context on where all this comes from. | history |
| backofficeshow.com | OS/2 enthusiasts. Yes, still. You'd be surprised what's still out there running OS/2. Good documentation of a capable OS that history treated poorly. | retrocomp |
| vt100.net | DEC VT100 terminal documentation and resources. More than you thought you needed to know about a terminal. Useful if you work with terminal emulators seriously. | hardware |
| deskthority.net | Mechanical keyboard enthusiasts but with heavy vintage focus. Model M, IBM keyboards, switches. The wiki is a serious reference. | hardware |
| pdp8online.com | PDP-8 preservation and simulation. Running the emulator is genuinely instructive about how computers worked when they were small. | retrocomp |
| multicians.org | Multics history and documentation. The system that Unix grew from rejecting. Understanding Multics is understanding Unix. More serious than you expect. | history |
People whose primary output is ideas, expressed in sentences.
| gwern.net | Gwern Branwen. The extreme end of the personal website. Enormous. Dense. Everything is footnoted. The dark patterns and spaced repetition essays are the most cited. You could spend a week here. | essays |
| slatestarcodex.com | Scott Alexander. Long essays on psychology, medicine, politics, rationalism. Moved to Substack (astralcodexten.com) but the old archive is here. Among the best long-form writing on the internet. | essays |
| ribbonfarm.com | Venkatesh Rao. "Refactored perception." Long essays on organisations, culture, systems. Dense. Sometimes pretentious. Often worth it anyway. | essays |
| antipope.org/charlie/ | Charles Stross. SF writer but the blog and essays are substantive. Thinks seriously about technology futures. Long archives. | writing |
| acoup.blog | A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. Bret Devereaux. History essays, often prompted by popular media getting things wrong. Long-form. Rigorous. Very readable. | history / essays |
| danluu.com | Dan Luu. Technology, software, sometimes hardware. Plain HTML, no styling. Intentionally. The about page explains why. The posts on tail latency and terminal emulators are useful. | tech / essays |
| aaronsw.com/weblog/ | Aaron Swartz's blog. Preserved. Everything is worth reading. The raw nerve is still there. Read "legacy" and "dying outside" and then read the better things. | essays / memorial |
| nav.al | Naval Ravikant. Ideas about wealth, philosophy, thinking. You'll agree with some of it, disagree with other parts, and either way think. Mostly aphorisms and short pieces. | ideas |
| McSweeneys | Not exactly a personal site but listed here because the Internet Tendency essays are of this tradition: text, wit, no design to speak of. | writing |
| writings.stephenwolfram.com | Stephen Wolfram's essays. Very long. Self-confident to a fault. The pieces on Mathematica history and the Ruliad are interesting even if you disagree with the conclusions. | essays / science |
Personal pages hosted on shared Unix servers. The tradition going back to the very beginning.
| tilde.club/~ford/ | Paul Ford's own tilde page. Started the whole modern revival. Read "I had a couple of drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds" for context. | tilde.club |
| tilde.town/~dozens/ | Hand-made games, experiments, curious things. The kind of page that exists because someone wanted to make it, full stop. | tilde.town |
| tilde.town/~vilmibm/ | Founder of tilde.town. If you want to understand what the tilde ethos is, start here. | tilde.town |
| tilde.town/~nossidge/ | Also runs the Tildeverse Browser, which lets you browse member homepages by tag. Useful for discovery. | tilde.town |
| cosmic.voyage | Collaborative science fiction universe hosted as a tilde. Members write entries as if from far-future civilisations. Strange and worthwhile. | tilde / fiction |
| tilde.institute | OpenBSD tilde. If you want to learn OpenBSD in a social environment rather than alone, this is it. | OpenBSD |
| tilde.team/~ben/ | Ben, who runs tilde.team. Documents the server and community. Useful if you're thinking about joining. | tilde.team |
| envs.net | Another tilde with web, gopher, and gemini spaces. Browse the user pages directory if you want to find people. | tilde |
| squiggle.city | Small tilde. "Making web pages and learning about the command line." Welcoming to beginners. | tilde |
| ctrl-c.club/~mio/ | One of the better personal pages on ctrl-c.club. Minimal. Personal. Worth reading. | ctrl-c |
Hand-coded personal sites with personality. Selected for having something to read, not for looking impressive.
| sadgrl.online | Sadness girl. Very active in the personal web community. Layout builder, resources for beginners, her own site. Good entry point for someone new to all this. | personal |
| goblin-heart.net/salazarre | Writing, world-building, personal essays. Dense with content. The kind of site that was made to be explored. | writing |
| lostletters.neocities.org | Fictional archive of letters from people who don't exist. Quiet and melancholy. Worth an afternoon. | creative |
| cinni.net | Pixel art, personal site, 2000s aesthetic. One of the most-visited on Neocities. Actually has things on it. | art / personal |
| yesterweb.org | Community and manifesto for the "old web" revival. Reading the manifesto will tell you whether you're in the right place generally. | community |
| xandra.cc | Personal site with writing, art, notes. Old-web sensibility applied thoughtfully. Not just aesthetic nostalgia. | personal |
| neonaut.neocities.org | Thoughtful personal essays, journal entries, technology opinions. Reads like someone actually working things out rather than performing having worked them out. | personal |
| melonking.net | King of Melons. Maximalist old-web style. The manifesto about reclaiming the web is worth reading even if the surrounding aesthetic isn't your taste. | personal / manifesto |
| shellsong.neocities.org | Linux and computing notes, personal writing, old-web styling. One of the better technically-inclined Neocities pages. | linux / personal |
| compudanzas.net | Low-tech computing, uxn/varvara, drawing, making. The intersection of old computing ideas and craft. Thoughtful and unhurried. | lo-fi / computing |
| thecreakingshelf.neocities.org | Books. Reading logs, notes, essays about what someone has read. The format this kind of site was made for. | reading |
| minerobber.neocities.org | Programming projects, notes, very old-web style. Actually writes about things he's done. | programming |
The original recommendation algorithm. A person curated this. No training data involved.
| hotlinewebring.club | Webring for personal sites. Member list is browsable. Joining requires submitting your site. Good signal-to-noise because of this. | webring |
| fediring.net | Webring for sites affiliated with the Fediverse / Mastodon ecosystem. Personal sites, blogs, homepages. | webring |
| geekring.net | Technology-focused webring. Old-school implementation. Browse forward and back from any member site. | webring |
| webring.xxiivv.com | Devine Lu Linvega's curated webring of "developers, designers and artists." Very high quality selection. Each member page interesting in its own way. | webring |
| brisray.com/webring/ | Directory of active webrings. Meta-list. If you want to find the right community ring for a topic, start here. | directory |
| curatedweb.net | Hand-curated directory of quality personal websites. Categorised. Maintained by a human who read the sites before listing them. | directory |
| HN personal sites | Hacker News "Show HN" posts about personal sites, via Algolia search. Imperfect but finds real people's homepages. Sort by date for the most recent. | directory |
| 250kb.club | Sites under 250kb page weight. Curated list. If a site is on here, it loads. That's the bar and it's a reasonable bar. | minimalism |
| 1mb.club | Sites under 1MB. Slightly more permissive than 250kb.club. Many good personal sites in here. | minimalism |
| blogroll.org | OPML-based blogroll for discovering personal blogs. People share their reading lists. Follow someone interesting and find twenty more. | directory |
Things that would otherwise disappear.
| web.archive.org | The Wayback Machine. You know this one. But: it has over 800 billion pages. Old GeoCities pages are in here. Use it to find things that have died. | archive |
| oocities.org | Mirror of old GeoCities pages. Preserved. Sometimes broken. Still there. Browse by neighbourhood to find old personal sites from 1997-2009. | geocities |
| theoldnet.com | Renders old websites as they looked at a given date. Uses the Wayback Machine but strips modern elements. More accurate impression of what a 1997 site looked like. | archive |
| cameronsworld.net | Collage of archived GeoCities content. Not a browsable archive, an art piece made from it. Gives you the correct feeling. | archive / art |
| archive.org usenet | Usenet archives on the Internet Archive. Older discussions not in Google Groups. The signal is in there if you dig. | usenet |
| comp.lang.c | The Usenet group for C programming. Decades of archive. Still occasionally active. Read the old threads. Standards discussion at the primary level. | usenet |
| NARA digital archive | US National Archives digital holdings. Listed here because they have technical documentation going back far enough to be interesting for historians of computing. | archive |
Didn't fit elsewhere. Worth having anyway.
| catb.org/jargon/ | The Jargon File. A glossary of hacker culture and terminology. Primary source for understanding where the culture came from. Read the introduction before diving in. | culture |
| folklore.org | Stories from the original Macintosh development team. Andy Hertzfeld's collection. Primary source history. Reads like it was written by people who were there, because it was. | history |
| usno.navy.mil | US Naval Observatory. Listed here specifically because it is a government website that looks exactly like it did in 1997 and for this reason is perfect. | government |
| textfiles.com | Jason Scott's archive of BBS text files, phreaking docs, old underground writing. Primary source for computing subculture before the web. | archive / culture |
| rfc-editor.org | RFC editor. How the internet actually works. Read RFC 1, then RFC 793 (TCP), then RFC 2822 (email). The writing is better than most technical writing from the same era. | standards |
| w3.org/History.html | The original proposal for the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee, 1989. One page. Read it. | history |
| quirksmode.org | Peter-Paul Koch on browser compatibility and web standards. Old now but historically important. The compatibility tables were the only reliable source for years. | web standards |
| 250bpm.com/blog:4/ | Martin Sustrik's "Why should I have started blogging earlier." Recommended reading for anyone putting off having a personal site. Short. Makes the case. | meta |
| zettelkasten.de | Luhmann's zettelkasten method and its modern practice. Relevant here because the people who have personal websites of the type listed above often use some version of this. | notes |
| 100r.co | Hundred Rabbits. Rek and Devine, living on a sailboat and making software and art. Absolutely committed to low-power, offline-first computing. Inspiring or alarming depending on your disposition. | lo-fi / sailing |
| solar.lowtechmagazine.com | Low Tech Magazine's solar-powered website. Goes offline when the sun doesn't shine. Not performance art: practical. The articles are good too. | lo-fi |
| drpetter.se | Tomas Pettersson. Creator of sfxr (now jsfxr), various games and tools. Personal homepage. Minimal. Has things on it. | games / tools |
| stuff.mit.edu | MIT student/faculty personal pages server. Listing this because browsing the directory shows you what personal academic homepages look like when nobody is trying to impress anyone. | academic |
Personal websites die. The person moves, loses interest, forgets to renew a domain, or simply removes something they no longer want published. I have tried to link to sites that have been stable for some time, but stability is not guaranteed. If something is dead:
I do not guarantee anything on this list. It was compiled by a person, which means it reflects what one person has found and thought worth keeping. There will be omissions. There will be things you disagree with including. That is unavoidable. The alternative is an algorithm and the algorithm is worse.
This directory: hand-typed. No CMS. Updated irregularly. No submissions form. Email the address at the top of my main page if you think something belongs here.
If you are the author of a site linked here and want to be removed, email me and I will remove you promptly and without argument.