I wish I’d taken screenshots over the years of how many times I’ve redone this site. Then again, that’s a longer slideshow than I’d have time to deal with.

But this is a big transition for me. I’ve self-hosted and patched things together on my own through wordpress.org for the better part of a decade now. I had a miserable time with GoDaddy after imploding my own site while working on it at 3 a.m. (never a good idea), and they held my site hostage for $200 to recover it. But that’s years in the past. 

I moved to Westhost, which is a nice host if you’re looking for something barebones that has a barely functional backend. But if you FTP all of your stuff, it’s a fantastic experience.

But it’s May, which means my annual fee was due. $100 was coming out of my wallet in the next week and I really wasn’t looking forward to it. Thankfully, my girlfriend was looking at hosts for her own site and rather than thinking of trying to find a host and putting together a WordPress install (mental note: I should really work on that), I checked out WordPress.com.

Now just a quick note: There are two different Wordpress configurations: WordPress.org is the self-hosted version where you host it yourself. WordPress.com is the service the company offers that’s free to start with, but has a few fees attached here and there.

It turns out what I needed fell under the free plan. Outside of $13/yr to map a domain I bought through another service, I’m not paying a dime.

As an added bonus, we use WordPress VIP (a much more costly and fully featured version for businesses) at CBS Sacramento, so I’m working in the same ecosystem across the board. 

The only headache is I have to reattach images to posts, and fix posts with custom slideshows—my page design archive is a puddle of URLs and short codes at the moment. 

But now I have a much better setup for posting and sharing things, which means I’ll be full of ambition and ready to write so much more. 

And then I’ll come back in September and this will be my most recent post.