Most personal websites eventually freeze, vanish or get replaced by a profile. Leigh Brasington’s site chose a fourth option: keep growing for decades until the sitemap looks like somebody’s brain escaped into HTML.
Visit Leigh Brasington’s website.
Brasington is a meditation teacher who has practiced since 1985, studied closely with Ayya Khema, began assisting her in 1994 and has led retreats since 1997. His site contains extensive Buddhist material on jhanas, suttas, dependent origination, meditation practice, translations, retreat schedules and several books.
If that were all it contained, it would already be substantial. It is nowhere near all it contains.
The sitemap also wanders into computer security, Windows versions, freeware, calendars, a Chevy Bolt, the Monty Hall problem, environmental material, economic graphs, travel, politics, photographs, autobiographical timelines, old computers and technical odds and ends accumulated over years.
The update log proves this is not a preserved corpse. In 2026 the site was still receiving frequent revisions, including meditation resources, Pali translation notes, reading lists, study guides, security pages and the site’s own enormous sitemap.
That continuity is what makes it unusual. Brasington had a GeoCities presence and explicitly told visitors not to bookmark it when GeoCities was closing, pointing them toward the independent domain instead. The content moved, but the personal-web model survived.
There is also a spectacular anti-advertising page. After receiving requests to place ads, Brasington posted rates in the billions of dollars per impression and effectively told advertisers to go away if they disliked the price. It may be the most efficient ad policy ever written.
The site’s value is not that every opinion on it is authoritative. It is that one person has kept a huge body of teaching, software, observations and personal history directly addressable on the open web instead of breaking it into posts controlled by several different companies.
Explore Leigh Brasington’s site and especially its sitemap. This is what the phrase “personal website” used to promise: not a résumé with better typography, but an expanding territory whose organizing principle is one person’s life.