As you all know, it’s November! The second week of November now.
I’ve taken October off from blogging or anything web-related to settle my jetlag right after returning from the Philippines. I do plan on making a travel blog for my two weeks in the old home country. However, this will be more of a reflection-type of post instead of promoting the sights and sounds of things completely new to me as a balikbayan. 1 More on this later once I start writing and posting my Philippines trip coming soon!
I haven’t traveled overseas, let alone riding an airline, for some 30 years now, that I once thought that I can overcome the jetlag because of the difference in time zones. Morning hours in the Philippines would be afternoon hours here in California, for example. I take naps in the afternoons, no problem. Boy, was I wrong! I was even more wrong when I struggled with the jetlag when I returned home than I did when I arrived over there. I also took the day off on the first day of my returning to work because of the jetlag. I finally went back to work a day later.
Unfortunately, the jetlag caught up to me while I was at work. Luckily, work had been very slow, so we had longer lunch hours. I would take a nap for about thirty minutes to an hour, depending on when we get dismissed to have our lunch break, and then wake up and still got some time leftover to kill before going back to work. It became a habit recently, but lately, my body is getting used to the usual PDT time zone. It even got harder when we had to change back the clocks to an hour and time went a lot slower.
Searching for a new platform to migrate… maybe?
I have been using WordPress for my blogs and personal sites for many years now. I believe it was back in 2007 when I started tinkering with WordPress. Even though I heavily relied on starter themes and site builder plugins, I really love this blogging/CMS platform. It helped me build sites that I envisioned, from a personal blog with an image gallery, toggle features on some sections, etc. It helped me create my hobby sites, such as fansites and other blogs related to some of my hobbies. Chika Wota Blog and Starpura Space are testaments to these.
I may not be a hardcore coder/dev, but I love WordPress to my heart. I even had Automattic as one of my dream companies to work for. I always saw the WordPress Community and Automattic being a leader in open source software. I’ve always been a follower of open source for the longest time. I’ve done all I can to teach myself how to code, and even if I went through so many failures, the open source philosophy and Automattic somehow kept me from quitting coding altogether.
And then, at the start of my Philippines trip, I see this in my news feed. My delulu (?) views of open source and WordPress suddenly went down the drain. I don’t use WP Engine or Flywheel as my host, but I do use Local as my local environment for testing WordPress sites. Well then, I guess I’ll have to find an alternative.
I still love this blogging platform that I’m using for all my sites now. But at the same time, using this platform with the CEO acting as a manchild bully made me feel that I’m going against my own personal values. I haven’t been writing here because I have been searching around for any possible WordPress alternatives. So far, I found a few, but I ended up going back to another trial of a popular SSG2 platform: Hugo.
Earlier today, I started to self-teach myself Hugo. I’ve been wanting to do a complete makeover of my current portfolio for so long now, but I haven’t had the time or the motivation to do so. I was currently using a free template that I modified to my own specs, but for some reason, adding the Blog link on the main menu changes the font completely. I’ve done a lot of my CSS fixes and it still looked different. I decided to make it as a “hidden” Font Awesome icon link along with the social media icons at the bottom instead. It still looked awkward.
Should I succeed in converting my HTML-only portfolio into a Hugo-powered site, I may considering using Hugo to migrate. But for now, converting my portfolio would be my “test”. We shall see the results soon!
That’s it for this post. Until next time!
