Essays · Web Culture

The slow death of the personal homepage.

For twenty years, the open web was a quiet country of strange, hand-built rooms. It is being consolidated into a small number of large, identical lobbies. The question is whether anyone misses the rooms.

By Margot Hensley Quarterly Essays

April 12, 2026 14 minute read

Illustration:

Topographic study, no. 4

by Aoife Renwick. Commissioned for

Quarterly

, spring 2026.

The first website I ever built lived on a free hosting service whose name I no longer remember. It was a single page about a band I had loved at fifteen and stopped loving by the time the page went up. The page had a green background, three broken images, and a footer that said, with no apparent irony, thanks for visiting my corner of the web.

That was 2003. The corner is gone. The web it sat in is gone too, in the sense that the part of the web most people now meet — the part they spend their evenings inside — has been consolidated into roughly seven destinations, all of which look about the same and behave about the same and are owned by about four companies. Whatever the personal homepage was, it has been replaced by a profile, and the profile is not a homepage. It is a tenancy.

I want to argue, not for nostalgia, but for the proposition that something specific was lost in this consolidation, and that the something is worth the trouble of getting back. The personal homepage was, for about fifteen years, the only widely available form of public writing that did not require an editor, a platform, or an audience. The fact that it produced a great deal of bad writing is not the point. The point is that it was a form, and the form is being forgotten¹.

A country of lobbies

Consider what an algorithmic feed actually is. It is a hallway, with a door at one end and a desk at the other, and the desk is staffed by a clerk whose only job is to decide which of the rooms behind the desk you will be permitted to look into next. The clerk is patient. The clerk is interested in you, in the specific sense that the clerk is paid by how long you stay in the hallway. The clerk has read every book you have ever opened in the building and every conversation you have had in the cafeteria, and although the clerk is, in a strict legal sense, not a person, the asymmetry between you and the clerk is the asymmetry of a stranger who has read your diary.

This is not, in itself, an argument against feeds. Feeds are useful. They are how you find out that an old friend has had a baby and that a writer you admire has published something new and that a building you used to walk past has burned down. The argument is narrower: feeds are not places. A feed cannot be visited. It cannot be linked to in a way that means the same thing tomorrow. It cannot be bookmarked, except in the sense that you can bookmark the front door of the building in which the clerk works. The hallway behind the door is different every time you arrive.

The personal homepage was a place. A bad place, often — slow, ugly, badly spelled — but a place. It had an address. The address pointed to the same words today and tomorrow and, with luck, in 2031. If a stranger arrived at the address, the stranger arrived at the same room you had arrived at, in the same condition. There was no clerk. There was, as the geographer

Yi-Fu Tuan

liked to say of small places, an experience of pause : somewhere a person had decided to mean something for longer than fifteen seconds

The mark of the maker

The other thing the homepage had, which the profile does not, was a maker's mark. You could tell, within thirty seconds of arriving, whether the person whose page you were on understood HTML well or badly; whether they had thought about colour; whether they cared about the line break between the second and third paragraph or had not noticed it. The page was a small, public sample of a private taste. It told you something about the person that the person had not, strictly speaking, decided to tell you. This is the texture of all good cities, and the absence of it is the reason most online platforms feel less like cities than like airport terminals.

Compare the dense, idiosyncratic homepages of the early web — say

Maciej Cegłowski's Idle Words

, or the long-dormant essays of

Paul Ford's Ftrain

— with the average corporate landing page of 2026. The corporate page is, by every measurable standard, more competent. The typography is better. The performance is better. The accessibility is better. And yet a person who reads the homepage of a stranger in 2009 learns more about the stranger, in less time, than a person who scrolls a thousand of the stranger's posts in 2026. The competence has cost something.

The archive problem

The deeper loss is harder to name, and it has to do with time. A homepage, when it works, is an archive of a person. Not a complete archive — nobody’s homepage was ever complete — but an archive in the way a small museum is an archive: a curated, signed selection that gestures at a larger life. The choice of what to include and what to omit is the work. Press view-source on a homepage from 2007 and you can usually still read the markup. The page survives because it is small, and its smallness is also its meaning.

A homepage as a small museum: five rooms, one front door, no clerk.

A profile, by contrast, is not an archive. A profile is the projection of a database table at a particular instant. The platform can change the schema overnight; rows that were public yesterday can become private, or vanish, by no decision of the person whose rows they are. The platform can be sold. The platform can simply lose interest. When this happens — and it does, every few years now, at industrial scale — what is lost is not only the writing but the shape of the writing. The choices about what came first and what came last and which photograph sat next to which paragraph were the work, and the database does not preserve the work, because the database was never asked to.

I have a folder on my laptop called old-sites/. It contains, among other things, the static HTML of a friend’s homepage from 2011. He is a competent man with a stable career. He has, in the years since, written perhaps four thousand posts on three different platforms, two of which no longer exist. Of those four thousand posts, I can recover, with effort, perhaps two hundred. Of the homepage, which contained eleven essays totalling about thirty thousand words, I can recover all of it, in less than a second, by double-clicking index.html. The asymmetry is not subtle. The work he gave to the platforms is mostly gone. The work he gave to himself is still here³.

A small example

It does not take much to make a homepage. The smallest possible version is a single HTML file in a directory you control, served by any host that will serve a directory. There is no framework, no build, no account . The whole thing fits in a paragraph of plain markup that any reader of

The Mythical Man-Month

would recognise as essentially unchanged since 1995. Here, more or less, is the entire structure:

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head><meta charset="utf-8"><title>A Page</title></head>
<body>
  <h1>Margot Hensley</h1>
  <p>I write about cities and the small machines inside them.</p>
  <ul>
    <li><a href="essays/lobbies.html">A country of lobbies</a></li>
    <li><a href="essays/archive.html">The archive problem</a></li>
    <li><a href="essays/footer.html">Notes from a small footer</a></li>
  </ul>
  <footer><p>Last edited: April 2026.</p></footer>
</body></html>

Listing 1: the smallest workable homepage. Twelve lines, no dependencies, expected lifespan of decades.

The interesting thing about the listing is not the markup. The interesting thing is the social form. Read the <ul> as a table of contents. The page is a hand-curated list of three other pages. A person made a decision about their order. A person decided that lobbies came first and footer came last. That decision is the writing, in the same sense that the order of the chapters of a book is the writing. A profile cannot make this decision. A profile is, by construction, anti-curatorial: every post sits beside every other, weighted by recency or by an opaque score, and the question of order is settled by a clerk you have never met.

A modest return

I am not arguing that everyone should keep a homepage. Most people don’t want one and never did. But the people who do want one, who feel the lack of one, are increasingly young — not the forty-something programmers who remember the era, but the eighteen-year-olds for whom the platforms have always been the default and have always been disappointing. The signs are small but real: the modest revival of webrings, the popularity of static-site generators among people with no reason to care about the term, the quiet drift of writers from newsletters back to their own domains. The form is being remembered.

What it asks of you is not technical skill. It asks for the willingness to make a small, public decision about how to be in a particular corner of a public space — and the patience to leave the decision standing for longer than a season. That is the whole craft. It is older than the web and will outlive whichever platform you are currently scrolling. The web does not need to be saved, and it cannot be. The room can be saved, one room at a time. Build a room.