I haven't used HTML in more than a decade, but a few things have driven back to the magical land of opening and closing tags.
First, WordPress has been driving me bananas for the last few years. The block editor was supposed to make things easier, and it kind of did, but it also made things feel even more bloated and unwieldy. Then there's the fact that running WordPress requires myraid plugins, and they often don't play nicely together. And finally, the themes that are available to pick from are not very customizable, and finding what few customizations you can make is a nightmare. The library of patterns and whatever is absolutely terrible.
The second factor is, as always, AI. I'm kind of tired of talking about it and reading about it, so I'm not going to go into any kind of moral and ethical argument here. The fact is, it further flattens an already flattened media landscape. Music, movies, books, websites &emdash; they all have the same sheen and are experienced in the same way. Adding more humanity to my website, not only through the words I type but through the extremely basic and shitty design I am able to muster, feels refreshing to me. You may not agree. You may prefer some kind of polish or a modicum of professionalism. You may maintain your shiny-surface taste even as I massacre my own with the look of this website and the gratuitous use of bold so I remember what the tags are.
If you would also like to learn or relearn HTML to make a website as lovely to look at as this one, and as human, I've been using HTML for People to learn. It's only taken a few hours.
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