In March of 2006 I bought this domain because I like blue yucca plants and I liked how the name sounded. That was the whole plan. There was no plan. It sat quietly for twenty years while I worked on other things, renewed once a year like a gym membership for a gym I never visited.
Earlier this year I finally did something with it, and the something was ridiculous on purpose. I opened Microsoft FrontPage 2003, a website tool old enough to rent a car, built a little page with a cowboy on it, and put it live on Cloudflare's modern edge network. It loaded instantly, everywhere, for free. A twenty year old file format riding a network from the future, and the two of them got along fine. That experiment is still up, preserved exactly as it was, and it is the reason the rest of this site exists.
Because here is what that silly page proved to me: a simple website has never needed much. It needs a file, and it needs a place to put the file. Everything else got added on top, and somewhere along the way the additions became the product.
The love hate part
I want to be fair here, because I have a genuine love hate relationship with website builders and hosting companies. They have their purpose. Many of the people who build them sincerely want to help, and for plenty of businesses they do help. But the business model has a gravity to it. Tools that start out helping you build have a way of drifting toward keeping you, and one day you notice that leaving means starting over, and staying means paying whatever staying costs now. Nobody twirled a mustache. The incentives just point that direction, and incentives usually win.
WordPress deserves its own paragraph, and a kind one. WordPress was and still is phenomenal. An enormous world of themes, plugins, and community help, most of it free, sitting at your fingertips. It opened the web to millions of people and I will not pretend otherwise. But it was never easy for most people, and these days it carries a lot of weight. For a small business that needs one good page, it can feel like buying a truck to carry a letter.
Where I think this goes
I think the future of hosting is the edge, and I think the best version of it is nearly invisible. Seamless to the point where it has no seams, where you almost forget hosting exists as a thing you did. Your site is just files, the files are just yours, and a global network serves them so quickly and cheaply that the hosting part fades into the background like electricity. The FrontPage experiment was my accidental preview of that future: an old file, a modern edge, nothing in between.
That is what BlueYucca is for. Simple HTML files you own, AI helpers that write them with you, and hosting that stays out of the way. It comes from the same conviction that started Cultivatum LLC years ago: cultivate small businesses, help them grow, and let them focus on what they do best. A website should be something you have, not something you rent.
Filed from Arizona, next to at least one actual yucca.