The Circle of the Dragon began on Angelfire in 2000 as a small site about dragons and serpents in mythology. A quarter-century later, Kylie “drago” McCormick is still maintaining it.
Visit The Circle of the Dragon
That history is unusually well documented because McCormick kept a site-information section explaining where the project lived, how it changed, and even what standards it used.
The original address was an Angelfire page. It moved to Brinkster in January 2001, used a shortcut URL for a while, and eventually acquired BlackDrago.com. The site says CircleOfTheDragon.com followed in 2009.
The code evolved too. It began in HTML 4.0 and shifted to XHTML 1.0 Strict in 2003. McCormick preserved screenshots of earlier designs, including enormous full-page captures from 2003 and 2006.
That alone makes the site useful to web historians: it documents its own migration out of the free-host era instead of silently replacing the past.
The small dragon page got out of hand
McCormick says the original plan was mostly to publish theories about dragons and serpents in myth. Once the “Dragons of Fame” section appeared, the scope widened.
The resulting site is a substantial personal reference work. It covers dragon traditions from different cultures, named dragons from mythology and fiction, proposed classifications, anatomy and biology, symbolism, artwork, literature, film, games, and the author’s own theories about how dragon traditions developed.
Some material is folklore, some is media cataloging, and some is explicitly speculative. The site does not magically turn mythology into zoology simply because it has diagrams and categories. But that mix is part of the artifact: this is what one person built after decades of reading, organizing, illustrating, and arguing with a subject she cared about.
The site’s information page was still being revised in June 2024. That matters. Plenty of old personal sites survive as abandoned snapshots; this one crossed from Angelfire-era hobby publishing into a maintained long-term project.
Modern web publishing often pushes people toward a feed: post something, let it fall down the timeline, post again. The Circle of the Dragon followed the older encyclopedia model instead. Pages accumulated. Categories deepened. Links connected related material. The website became the project.
For webmasters, that durability is worth studying. The site has changed hosts, domains, markup standards, and visual designs without surrendering its identity to a platform.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list exists partly to find exactly this sort of long-running independent work: not a viral page, but a personal knowledge base that simply refused to disappear.
Twenty-five years is a long time to keep writing about dragons.
Apparently there was still more to say.