I've been running a personal website of varying quality and quantity since about 1994 when I was studying Computer Science at Curtin University.
This is my latest incarnation, and was built more as an excuse to play around with php and mysql than anything else.
While looking for more of a dynamic site for news and content, I trialled a few open source packages like PHP-Nuke, Post-Nuke, Xaraya, Xoops, the list goes on, but none really did what I wanted without all the bloat. So I started writing a simple interface to do the job.
This site uses the mod_rewrite feature of Apache which is really cool for hiding the messy url's that dynamic sites usually have.
Also my Photo Gallery is powered by the Gallery script... most recommended.