Welcome to Hubless, a site written and coded by me—Steve Calvert. On this page, I will explain what Hubless is and why I created it. If you want to skip reading the text below, here’s the explanation in a nutshell: Hubless is a personal project. That’s it. Nothing more. But, hopefully, those who visit will find the information I provide here is useful. You can find all the pages added to date, by visiting this link
Why Hubless
In September 2014, I learned about an online publishing platform called HubPages and opened an account under a pseudonym. HubPages was originally a single site that allowed people to publish their content online and earn a share of the revenue generated by their pages, often called “Hubs”. Later, in response to changes in the Google algorithm, Hubpages introduced a network of specialist sites, and began moving many of their best pages over to them.
My first article, and most successful one—as in most viewed—provided information about keeping tarantula spiders as pets. After the new sites were introduced, it was moved over to PetHelpful. However, I was never a successful HubPage writer. It took me more than five years to reach the payment threshold of $50.
Not to be defeated, I planned to write many more pages, on a variety of subjects. However, although I published a number of additional pages, one way or another, they never got much traffic, and I don’t like the idea of creating content for sites that I don’t own and, therefore, have no control over. I’d written for several sites in the past, that suddenly closed shop. I was never sure HubPages wouldn’t go the same way, but it’s been online since 2006, and continues to go from strength to strength.
The other thing I don’t like about HubPages is it only offers payment via PayPal. I hate PayPal. Whenever you receive funds, it takes a big chunk of your money. There are far better payment processing options available, so I try to avoid it.
Nevertheless, I was content to allow my original content to sit on the site, knowing I may get a tiny bit of pocket money every five years or so. Things changed at the back end of 2024, when I received an email from HubPages stating PetHelpful would become a stand-alone site. Because of this, The Arena Group—the present owners of HubPages, would no longer be able to share revenue with the authors whose content populated the site and helped make it successful. How cool is that?—not!
However, in all Fairness to HubPages, it did offer authors the option to move their articles to the main site, and retain their revenue share (likely to be much lower). It also suggested leaving the content in place and changing author names and bios, presumably to encourage those who are keen to "get their name out there", but I decided to take a different route. I removed my spider article from the platform, planning to add it to one of my own websites or blogs.
It took me to January 2025 to decide what to do with my article. That's when I came up with the idea of making a Hubless page and housing it on a subdomain of stevecalver.net. There are many ways to build websites. When I first began doing so, I used a What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) code editor and then went in and tweaked the HTML, where necessary. Later, I used content management systems such as WordPress and Textpattern, and, as with my WYSIWYG editor, I tweaked the code as and when required.
However, I've recently been doing a coding course, so I decided to build my Hubless page the old-fashioned way—by writing it as code, and now, instead of reading my spider article at HubPages, you can access it HERE on my Hubless website.
I plan to move the rest of my HubPages over to Hubless, and also make pages from some of the content I wrote for other revenue-sharing websites. When I have finished doing that, I may write some articles specially for my Hubless project because doing so will help me maintain and improve my coding skills.
Steve Calvert