For a few years I’d used WordPress installed on a DigitalOcean virtual private server running OpenLiteSpeed to host my personal site. It didn’t cost much per month but it was rather neglected.

Eventually I decided to try using a static site generator with my email provider’s included web hosting. My needs are rather simple and it seemed like a great idea to use Markdown files for my content. In theory, it’s all I really need and I started using Hugo.

Unfortunately, I found myself spending more time fighting with Hugo themes and all sorts of weird issues than creating any actual content. Too many seemingly simple things actually weren’t very simple. For one thing, including images in a post was a nightmare and involved turning a Markdown file into something with a partial-HTML file if I actually wanted the images to display correctly.

My site still barely got updated. Thanks to updates in Hugo, going back to work on my site after a few months usually involved troubleshooting all sorts of errors when running Hugo for the first time after a while. Working on my site just became quite annoying at best.

My health has been on a downward trajectory for the past decade and by now I don’t have all that much energy on a daily-basis. Ease-of-use has became increasingly valuable in all areas of my life, and for my personal web site a few dollars a month to not have to spend hours fighting with a static site generator seems quite worth it.

So yesterday I decided to just go back to what I’d used before: WordPress. I could’ve just picked an inexpensive shared hosting plan but I like having more control over my site, so I again went with a DigitalOcean VPS running OpenLiteSpeed. All the basic stuff is configured though there is some under-the-hood stuff that I need to work on. For now, I have a basic site that has about the same (lack of) content I had on my Hugo-generated static site. I’m having to re-learn WordPress since it’s changed quite a bit over the past few years, so stuff will get shuffled around here.

One major goal is to start documenting some of my electronics collections, most-notably my calculator collection. My plan is to have both a summary page, with photos, and I also hope to do some more in-depth posts about some of them.

I plan to post a bit about more personal stuff, like my health and being transgender, as well. I’ve generally limited my online writing about that stuff to social networking sites so this will be a bit of a change. In the offline world I’ve become increasingly engaged in transgender and disability activism, and I definitely have things I want to say.