What brought me to WordPress, to commit to installing it and learning all the programs and routines around it?

For dozens of years I was a happy Google user. I have a legacy storage account, no reason to give that up; I used Google Buzz for as long as it ran, I boosted Blogger when Google purchased it, I have a few websites through Google Pages and Google Sites. Then they announced in moderated, polite words that they would lock down “adult content” blogs, which is a form of morality-policing censorship, and I had one. I have several blogs dedicated to various interests (stationery, short stories, North Korea, travel, etc.), including a kind of social media hub for my erotica. I wrote in to protest, as did thousands of other users.

Eventually Google retracted their intention, though they used much harsher, judgmental phrases to break this news, representing their deep displeasure at being ordered around by their constituency. This incident motivated me to look at online vehicles and networks other than Google products, and I played around with Tumblr (which has unfettered content policies) and other places, but decided I should start my professional website. And there were other turnkey site-building programs and apps, but WordPress was what most people used. I’d toyed with it a couple times but never really explored it. Which I’m doing now.

I’ve downloaded… some ZIP folder from WP, bought a domain name, researched an eco-friendly Web hosting company (which provided an FTP client, as opposed to the one I thought I was going to use and, therefore, donated nine bucks to, because I like to support developers), tediously uploaded files one by one onto my site before discovering a WP installation app… and now here I am. Writing the preliminary blog entry, getting ready to explore my site’s capabilities and design it the way I picture it in my head. I hope this place will become my online hub of everything I do and create online, as well as a portfolio of my work as both a writer and an editor (we’ll see what that looks like).

[Ed. note, 4/6/2017: You’ll notice there are older entries than this post. The travel posts were backdated to the dates of those adventures; the old blog posts were salvaged from two prior blogs and recreated here. Sorry for the confusion.]