The Personal Homepage

~ a brief life ~

This memorial is not for a single product but for a category. The personal homepage as a normal artefact of being online. From about 1995 to 2008, a big fraction of internet users (in the US, perhaps 5-15% of all internet users; in tech-engaged communities, much higher) maintained a personal homepage, because by 2010 the percentage had collapsed to less than 1%. The category, as a mainstream thing, was over.

The personal homepage was not strictly killed; it was outcompeted, slowly, by progressively more convenient ways of expressing yourself online: blogs (Blogger, LiveJournal, then WordPress), then social network profiles (MySpace, Facebook), then microblogs (Twitter), then visual networks (Instagram, TikTok). Each migration traded a piece of authorial control for convenience. The personal homepage required that you write HTML. The social profile required only that you fill in form fields. The form-field model won.

~ the canonical structure ~

A typical personal homepage of 1999 had certain conventional sections, varying mostly in order:

• The greeting. "Welcome to my homepage!" Often with an animated GIF of a hand waving, or a cartoon character.
• About me. First name, age (often), a picture (sometimes), location (city only or full state), occupation, hobbies. The content was almost always the same set of facts, presented in idiosyncratic ways.
• My pets. Photos and names of cats, dogs, occasionally hamsters, rarely fish or reptiles. Each pet got a paragraph.
• My favourite links. A list of bookmarks the homepage owner thought worth sharing. Yahoo, Google, fan sites for their favourite TV show or band, the homepage of their best friend.
• The webring. A small banner at the bottom: "this site is part of the [genre] webring. previous · next · random."
• The hit counter. "You are visitor #00427." Ostensibly tracking traffic; actually a status symbol.
• The guestbook. A separate page where visitors could leave a message. Many guestbooks accumulated 4-12 messages over their entire lifetime, usually from the homepage owner's parents and one cousin.
• The email link. A "mailto:" link that sometimes opened a mail client and sometimes triggered a small panic about who would email you.
• The "last updated" date. Almost always months out of date.

~ the aesthetic ~

The aesthetic of the personal homepage was an honest folk art. The conventions: a tiled background image (a galaxy, a brick wall, a stretched JPEG of cherry blossoms), text in a high-contrast colour (often hot pink or neon green), Comic Sans or Times New Roman as the default font, an <hr> horizontal rule between sections, a "back to top" link rendered as an animated arrow GIF, an "under construction" sign showing a man with a hard hat shoveling dirt.

None of this was professional. None of it was tested. None of it was intended to compete with anyone. The personal homepage was, in this sense, the truest expression of "the web is for everyone." A normal person could open Notepad, write a few HTML tags, FTP it to a free hosting service, and have a presence on the World Wide Web. Their presence was, by professional standards, ugly and broken. It was theirs.

~ what killed it ~

The personal homepage died of three slow-acting diseases:

Blogging. Blogger (1999), LiveJournal (1999), Movable Type (2001), WordPress (2003) made publishing easier. You no longer had to write HTML. You typed into a text box; the platform produced the page. The trade-off: you had less control. The trade-off was almost always worth it. By 2003 most former personal-homepage users had moved to a blog. The homepage became static; the blog was where the activity moved.

Social networks. MySpace (2003) and Facebook (2004) absorbed most of the remaining homepage functionality - profile, photos, friends list, contact info, into a single account. By 2007 most casual users had a Facebook profile and no longer felt the need for a separate homepage. The personal homepage's remaining audience. The curious extended family who had once Christmas-emailed your URL. Now found you on Facebook instead.

The convenience compound. Each new platform required less work. Social networks required less than blogs. Microblogs (Twitter) required less than social networks. Visual networks (Instagram) required less still. The trajectory of internet personal expression has been monotonically downward in input requirement and authorial control. The personal homepage required the most input and gave the most control. It was outcompeted.

~ what's gone ~

The visible voice. A personal homepage's design was as much a self-portrait as the words on it. The colour choices, the layout, the choice of background tile, the typography: all of this was authored by the person whose page it was. Social network profiles look identical except for the photo. Tumblr came closest to recovering this. Most modern profiles have been homogenised.

The unsubsidised internet. A personal homepage was, on a free hosting service, sustained without advertisements (mostly), without algorithmic feed placement (entirely), and without a corporate platform owning your audience. The current internet is mediated; the homepage internet was disintermediated. The shift has consequences nobody fully appreciates yet.

The patience for slow rewards. Maintaining a personal homepage rewarded long-term commitment with a small number of devoted readers. Most homepages had perhaps 5-50 regular visitors. The relationship was intimate. Modern social media optimises for big audiences and brief attention. The 30-visitor homepage cannot exist on Instagram; the algorithm would simply hide it.

~ the renaissance ~

Beginning around 2018, a small movement to bring back personal homepages began among technologists, because it is sometimes called the "small web" or "indie web" or simply "personal sites." Tools like Carrd, Bear Blog, and Astro have made it easier to publish a personal homepage. Mastodon, micro.blog, and similar federated networks have provided a social layer that respects personal site ownership.

The renaissance is real but small, while it is not a mass movement. It will probably not become one. The personal homepage as a folk art is, by all evidence, gone for the median user. It exists as a deliberate choice for a minority that is willing to spend the effort.

This is fine. Not every cultural form needs to scale. The personal homepage's twenty-year reign was a specific moment when a particular kind of effort was rewarded with a particular kind of presence. The reward structure has changed, because the form has receded. It deserves to be honoured for what it was.

~ epitaphs ~

"my homepage in 1999 had four sections: about me, my dog, my favourite links, and a haiku. the haiku was about my dog. the homepage is gone. the dog has been gone for fifteen years. the haiku was actually pretty good.". e.ö. 46

"i made my mum a personal homepage for her birthday in 2001. she did not understand what it was. she printed it and showed her sister. her sister did not understand either. but for fifteen years they referred to me as 'the one who made me a website,' which was, after all, the point.", a.k. 41

"in 2018 i made a personal homepage for the first time in twenty years. it took me a weekend. it has fewer visitors per month than my old homepage had per day. it is also the part of my online presence i now feel most attached to.", m.r. 47