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.