There and Back Again

There is a particular kind of internet history that lives in people who were blogging before blogging became content strategy, platform optimization, and algorithm management. I go back to 1998, to a time when having a website felt less like participating in a system and more like staking out a small corner of the frontier for yourself. The web felt more personal then. It was slower, messier, less polished, and far more human. That is where I began.

My first real home in that world was Greymatter by Noah Grey. It felt revolutionary in the way only early web tools could. It suggested that publishing didn't belong exclusively to institutions or people with technical teams behind them. A single person with a thought, a point of view, and the patience to make things work could build something real. Later, I moved on to Movable Type by Ben and Mena Trott, which felt like a natural step forward. It was part of that early blogging era that helped define what personal publishing could be when it still belonged primarily to individuals.

Eventually, like much of the world, I landed on WordPress. For a long time, it was the right place to be. It was powerful, flexible, and open enough to feel aligned with the values that had drawn so many of us online in the first place.

But over time, that relationship changed. WordPress leaned further and further into a visual editing experience, while I remained what I had always been: someone who preferred a code-first workflow. I don't want publishing to feel like dragging blocks around a canvas. I want to work close to the text, close to the structure, close to the underlying machinery. I want to write in a way that feels direct.

What frustrated me was not simply that WordPress evolved. All software evolves. It was that the way I preferred to work increasingly felt like something I had to defend. To get back to a plain text experience, it became necessary to install a plugin just to reclaim a workflow that once felt normal. At a certain point, that stopped feeling like adaptation and started feeling like surrender.

At the same time, the internet around us was changing in even more profound ways. Social media didn't just become popular. It became dominant. More and more of what people wrote, shared, built, and expressed moved onto platforms that looked free on the surface but came with an invisible cost. The cost was ownership. We were told we were publishing ourselves, but more and more we were simply feeding systems designed to contain, monetize, sort, and repurpose our work. Our writing lived on borrowed land. Our audiences were mediated. Our archives became vulnerable to business decisions, interface changes, policy shifts, and the logic of algorithms that cared less about meaning than engagement.

That shift has always bothered me. One of the great promises of the early web was that you could make something that was yours. Not rented. Not optimized for someone else’s feed. Not buried because it failed to perform. Yours. A website wasn't just a profile inside a larger machine. It was a place. Your place. The rise of social media diluted that feeling, and in many cases replaced it entirely. We gained reach, perhaps, but lost a great deal of independence in the process.

That is part of what led me to make a different decision. Instead of continuing to adapt myself to tools and ecosystems that were moving further away from the way I think, write, and build, I decided to devote time and energy to creating my own CMS.

That decision gave birth to Hudson.

Hudson is a flat-file, code-first content management system developed by my company, Hudson Mill. It is a technical project, yes, but it is also a philosophical one. It comes from years of living through the evolution of online publishing, from the personal web to the platform web, and feeling that something important had been lost along the way. Hudson is my answer to that loss. It is built on the belief that publishing should still feel personal. It should still be readable at the source. It should still belong to the person doing the writing.

I wanted a system that respected plain text. I wanted something that didn't treat code as a secondary concern or an eccentric preference. I wanted something lightweight, durable, and understandable. I wanted a CMS that didn't ask me to fight for control over my own workflow. More than that, I wanted a publishing environment that returned ownership to the person making the thing.

In many ways, Hudson is the continuation of a line that starts back in 1998. It carries something forward from Greymatter, from Movable Type, from the best years of WordPress (IMHO) before so much of the web became enclosed by platforms and abstractions. It reflects the values that first made the internet exciting to me: independence, simplicity, authorship, and control. It is my way of building the tool I still want to use, for the kind of web I still believe in.

Maybe that is what being old school means now. Not nostalgia for its own sake, and not resistance to change simply because it is change. It means remembering that the web was once a place where individuals could build their own homes rather than decorate rented rooms. Hudson comes from that belief. It is my attempt to make a system for people who still want their content to be their own.