fLaMEd fury is the kind of site that makes me remember why I started Early Web Links in the first place. Built and maintained by a New Zealand dad who goes by fLaMEd, it's a personal homepage in the truest sense. A collection of stuff that, as he puts it, "means everything to me and probably nothing to you." He's been on the web since 1996, and the site itself dates back to 1999. You can feel all of those years in the way the thing is put together.
The homepage hits you with exactly the right energy. There's a "What's going on Internet?" greeting, a list of recent blog posts, a "Stuck In My Head" music widget pulling from Last.fm, 88x31 buttons at the bottom, and webring links. It's dense in the best way. Not cluttered, just full of life. You can tell immediately that this person actually uses their website as a living document, not a portfolio piece gathering dust.
What really got me clicking around was the sheer number of collection pages. The Recordshelf catalogs 117 vinyl records with stats on top artists, genres, and years. Eminem leads the count with 11 records, and the collection leans heavily into hip hop, which I respect. But then there's the Beer Fridge, and this is where I really lost track of time. fLaMEd has logged 2,493 check-ins across 1,620 unique beers from 330 breweries. There are ABV distribution charts. There are ratings. The whole page reads like a love letter to New Zealand's craft beer scene, complete with honest commentary about the early days when quality control between batches was all over the place.
The Bookshelf is equally thorough, tracking every book read going back years (59 books in 2024 alone, 75 in 2023). And there's a blog stats page with a GitHub-style contribution graph showing posting activity across the years. These aren't just list pages. They're the kind of obsessive personal record-keeping that only works on your own website, where nobody's telling you it needs to fit a content strategy.
The blog posts themselves cover a wide range. Travel stories about New Year's in the Marlborough Sounds, write-ups on concerts, thoughts on moving bookmarks to a self-hosted tool called Linkding, and regular link dumps curating interesting reads from across the indie web. The Now page is packed with detail about what he's reading, watching, listening to, and doing with his kids. It's genuinely personal in a way that most "now pages" only gesture at.
Two pages really stood out to me. The first is Early Web Memories, where fLaMEd writes about getting his first Pentium PC in 1995, paying $20 an hour at internet cafes, searching for X-Men on the web, and bringing home a .bat file on a floppy disk to mod Command and Conquer. These are raw, unedited memories, and they hit hard if you were online around that same time.
The second is I Love The Web, which is less a blog post and more a manifesto. fLaMEd writes about what made the old web special (the people, the links, the wandering), what changed, and why the personal web is coming back. It's passionate without being preachy, and it includes a genuinely useful list of resources for anyone who wants to build their own site.
There's also a Links page packed with web directories, newsletters, and podcasts. A Blogroll with short, personal descriptions of every site listed. An Interests page. A Guestbook. The site is huge, but it never feels bloated. It feels like someone's home.
fLaMEd fury is exactly the kind of site I want to send people to when they ask what a personal website can be. Go poke around. Start anywhere. Click whatever catches your eye. That's the whole point.