The page at tilde.club/~phcordner/ is not a portfolio, résumé or startup landing page.
It is an argument about hot dogs.
Visit Evelyn’s Chicago Style Hot Dog Page
The page explains the anatomy of a Chicago-style dog in full: all-beef frankfurter, poppy-seed bun, yellow mustard, neon-green relish, chopped onions, tomato, pickle spear, sport pepper and celery salt. Then it reaches the important civic matter.
No ketchup.
The author does not present this as a nuanced debate. Ketchup is described as overpowering the balance of the other ingredients, followed by the familiar Chicago rule that adults should know better.
From there the page becomes something better than a recipe. It is a personal map of hot-dog places and memories.
The closed restaurants are part of the archive now
Entries cover places such as Budacki’s, Superdawg and several businesses that have since closed. Those dead entries are not deleted. They move into a section labeled “The Great big Meatpacking Plant in the Sky,” where Hot G Dog, Wiener and Still Champion, and Hot Doug’s remain attached to stories about neighborhoods, owners, fries, sausage and the experience of eating there.
That is what a good personal page can preserve that a current business directory usually cannot.
A directory wants to answer whether a restaurant is open right now. A personal homepage can remember why somebody cared when it was open.
The page also sits inside Tilde Club, the shared Unix community that revived the old convention of personal home directories exposed as ~username websites. At the bottom is a Tilde Club webring with a random-page link, turning one person’s Chicago food obsession into a doorway to somebody else’s completely unrelated obsession.
That is extremely old-Web behavior running on deliberately modern community infrastructure.
There is no requirement that the next page share a topic. The connection is that another human being made it.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains plenty of pages organized exactly this way: not around a market category, but around the fact that one person knew something specific and felt like publishing it.
You can learn the approved Chicago hot-dog ingredients anywhere.
A page that also tells you which dead restaurant somebody still misses is harder to replace.