This page used to be a list of people. Not a page about people, a list of them: names, a line each, a link to their site, and in a fair few cases a little pixel-art figure I had made for them. If you were on the internet in about 2002 you had one of these, and mine ran to seventy links.
It was called a blogroll, and it was the closest thing the web had to a friends list. There was no other way to find out that somebody you liked reading also liked reading somebody else. The only discovery mechanism was a person, pointing.
What happened to it
I went through the links before rewriting this page. Twelve distinct websites, once you strip out the duplicates.
Two of them were companies that are still trading, so they don’t count. One of them was mine. That leaves eight personal sites belonging to actual people, and of those eight, exactly one is still a personal website.
Of the rest: two are now parked on domain resale services, with a form where the writing used to be. Four have no DNS record at all, which is a very quiet way for something to end. And one still resolves, still points at a server, and that server no longer answers. Somebody is still paying for the domain. Whatever was behind it stopped some time ago and nobody has taken it down.
That last one bothers me more than the dead ones.
Then I found an older one
After writing the above I remembered there had been an earlier version of this, on the domain I used before the blog moved here. The Internet Archive still has it: July 2003, eighteen blogs, first names only, under the heading “other sites”. So I checked all eighteen.
Six are still personal websites belonging to the same people. That’s a considerably better survival rate than the later list managed, which I didn’t expect.
Of the twelve that aren’t: six have no DNS record at all. Two still serve a site, but the blog inside it’s a 404. Two domains have been taken over and repurposed, one now openly for sale with a phone number where the writing used to be, the other trading as a consultancy. And one resolves, connects, and returns two bytes. No content at all, and not even an error. Somebody is paying for that name to serve nothing, which I find more dispiriting than any of the ones that simply stopped.
The six survivors are where it gets odd, because two of them are no longer blogs.
One says, more or less in its entirety, that this is Simon’s personal website, that there’s not much here right now, but that there’s some stuff in these other places, followed by a list of platforms. The other is titled “This use to be a Thing” and consists of links to Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter, plus his zine.
Both of them kept the domain. Both moved the writing to somewhere they don’t own, and left a forwarding address. Two other people made the argument of this page for me, by accident, on their own sites, in a form I could still read twenty three years later.
Why it stopped mattering
Social networks made this page redundant, and they did it fairly. The follow list was a better blogroll: it updated itself, it told you when somebody posted, and you didn’t have to hand-edit a table of contents every time a friend moved house. Nobody stopped maintaining their blogroll out of laziness. We stopped because something arrived that did the job properly.
The catch, which took about fifteen years to become obvious, is that the better version lived on somebody else’s computer. My list of interesting people is now spread across four platforms, two of which have changed hands, one of which no longer shows me most of it, and none of which will hand it over in a form I can keep. The old table of links was worse in every respect except the one that turned out to matter, which is that I still have it. It’s the reason I could go and check what happened to all those sites this afternoon.
Why it might matter again
Two things have shifted at once.
People are drifting back toward owning their own corner again. Not many, and not fast, but the number of individuals I read who publish on their own domain has gone up rather than down for the first time since roughly 2006.
At the same time, finding any of them through a search engine has become properly difficult. Search results are now largely a ranked list of whoever wanted the traffic most, which by definition isn’t the person maintaining an unmonetised site about one narrow subject. I don’t think this is a conspiracy, I think it’s just what happens when the incentive is commercial and the good stuff isn’t.
So we’re back where we started. If the search engines won’t surface the interesting personal sites and the platforms won’t let you export your list of them, the remaining mechanism is a person, pointing. Which is what this page was for.
What happens to the old one
It’s archived rather than published. Partly because most of it points at nothing now, but mostly because the original carried twenty-three email addresses belonging to other people, none of whom agreed to that in 2002 and none of whom should have to think about it in 2026. Publishing my own details was my mistake to make. Publishing theirs wasn’t.
The list, then
Since I’ve been promising one: the people from that 2003 page who are still publishing on a domain of their own. First names only, as it was then. Everything else I write is over on Elsewhere.
- luke, at captainfez.com, where a curmudgeon writes
- simon, at minor9th.com
- jonathan, at overyourhead.co.uk, with the same tagline it had then
- tom, at plasticbag.org, established 1999 and still going
- rob, at robertwray.co.uk, which now also has recipes
- sparky, at ultrasparky.org
Six is all that seems to be left from that 2003 page. Granted that’s 23 years ago now, but I’ve got underwear older than that.
If you have a site, or you know one worth reading, the comments are open.