Tag: personalweb

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Ancient Web: Cayzle Spent 27 Years Building a Website About Lion-Centaurs

Some personal sites are broad because their owners lose focus. Cayzle.com is broad because one person has spent more than a quarter century refusing to stop thinking about feline centaurs.

Visit Cayzle’s Wemic Site

The site launched on July 6, 1999. Its central subject is the wemic: essentially a lion-centaur, with a human-like upper body joined to a lion’s body. From there the rabbit hole expands into Dungeons & Dragons rules, mythology, ancient art, heraldry, fiction, character sheets, campaigns, webcomics and original tabletop game design.

There are pages on wemic culture and society, origins, D&D implementations across editions, art, fiction and character rules. There are also free RPG PDFs and a home-grown d20 game called Labyrinths & Liontaurs.

That would already be enough for one strange website.

It kept going.

A living fossil, not an abandoned one

The change log is the real historical document.

In 1999 Cayzle was confirming links, trading banners and expanding campaign pages. In 2000 the site joined webrings and reorganized itself. In 2001 it added prestige classes and third-edition D&D material. GeoCities later died, leaving broken links that had to be repaired.

The site resurfaced with a major redesign in 2013.

It is still being updated in 2026.

The current homepage still offers a guestbook, email list, link roll and multiple webring memberships alongside newer material. That mixture is rare: the old architecture was not replaced by a platform account. It was kept alive and extended.

Cayzle even restored a guestbook in 2026 after the previous hosting service disappeared years earlier.

For webmasters, that is useful evidence that a personally owned website can survive platform cycles if somebody cares enough to maintain it. For RPG researchers, the site preserves decades of homebrew rules and fan culture that would otherwise be scattered across dead forums and vanished hosts.

This site was found in CacheRat’s broader Ancient Web research corpus.

Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list

There are easier ways to publish online than maintaining a handcrafted lion-centaur archive for 27 years.

Fortunately, Cayzle did not choose one of them.

Read Cayzle’s site history and latest material

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Ancient Web: Professor Shoelace Built an Empire Around Knots

Ian Fieggen looked at the Internet and decided the world needed a definitive shoelace website.

He was correct.

Visit Ian Fieggen’s website

Fieggen, also known as “Professor Shoelace,” has kept the site online for more than two decades. The homepage says it has seen around 50 million visitors, and its biggest section is exactly what the nickname promises: lacing methods, shoelace information, knot instructions, and the “Ian Knot,” which Fieggen presents as the world’s fastest shoelace knot.

That would already be enough material for one extremely committed personal site.

Naturally, there is more.

A personal website is allowed to contain a person

The site also has sections for Fieggen’s old Windows software, computer graphics work, personal writing, family history, and a page about his father Chris Fieggen, an early computer programmer for ANZ Bank in the 1960s.

The software section preserves tiny Windows utilities such as JPGExtra and PNGExtra. The graphics section comes from decades of experimentation with computer graphics. The family section reaches into genealogy.

Nothing says these subjects belong under one modern content niche.

They belong together because Ian made the website.

That is one of the most useful things the old personal Web can remind a webmaster in 2026. A site does not always need to begin with a market category. Sometimes depth arrives because somebody keeps following their interests for twenty years.

And shoelaces turn out to contain plenty of depth.

There are practical tying problems, decorative lacing patterns, knot mechanics, common mistakes such as the crooked Granny Knot, and enough variations to justify an entire specialist reference.

The front page was updated in November 2025. It still looks and behaves like a personal reference site rather than a media property trying to capture a demographic.

This is one of the 1,967 domains gathered in CacheRat’s Ancient Web research list, where specialist sites like this are mixed with technical archives, museums, fan pages, historical resources, and personal rabbit holes.

Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list

The funny part is that “a website about shoelaces” sounds trivial until you need to know something specific about shoelaces. Then suddenly you are very glad Professor Shoelace exists.

Explore Ian Fieggen’s website