A personal homepage used to be allowed to contain whatever happened to be inside one person’s head. Paul Burgess’s site still follows that rule: writings, fiction, interests, philosophical material, and what the homepage itself calls “pseudo-philosophical ramblings.”
Visit Paul Burgess’s personal website
The domain dates to 2001, but the material reaches across a broader period of personal Web culture in which the homepage was not a résumé and did not need a content strategy.
Burgess wrote fiction, essays, definitions, commentary, and material touching on subjects such as semiotics and philosophy. One older essay, Why Triadic?, concerns the structure of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory and has been cited in later academic work on Peirce and artificial intelligence.
Elsewhere the site is simply personal.
That mixture is the point.
Before every interest needed its own account
Burgess also maintained a blog called Let the Finder Beware. In his final post in November 2007, he wrote that he had been blogging for about three years, had produced 951 posts, and finally felt that he was running out of fresh things to say.
That ending is almost quaint now.
The modern Web is built around systems that would strongly prefer nobody ever conclude they have posted enough. Personal sites worked differently. You could write hundreds of entries, stop, leave the archive standing, and move on without an algorithm sending concerned notifications about your engagement metrics.
The relationship between Burgess’s homepage and blog is also typical of the transitional Web of the early 2000s. The personal domain remained the stable home for longer-form material and identity, while Blogger handled the chronological stream. The platforms were tools attached to a personal site rather than replacements for one.
What survives is therefore more than a collection of essays. It is a model of publishing in which a person’s interests did not need to be commercially coherent.
A philosophy page could sit next to fiction. A blog could link back to an old essay. A definition written years earlier could later appear in somebody else’s bibliography. The website accumulated a shape because the author did, not because a template designer had decided where the “content pillars” belonged.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list exists for exactly these personal sites. They are difficult to summarize because summarization was never the point.
The homepage was the category.