Jumping to Neocities
I jumped in! I have decided to give up on hosted Wordpress, switch to static site content, and use Pelican for site construction. After playing with Pelican some, puttering with themes, and learning some reStructuredText, this seems like a good step to take; I think it will be way less rigmarole than Wordpress.
This really appeals to me on several levels, beyond just the reduction in in complexity and reduction in management of the site. I like the more "bare metal" aproach of just using CSS and HTML, and I like that I don't need to deal with databases, Javascript, PHP, etc. Granted, Pelican is a bit higher level than simple CSS and HTML, but it's relatively low level and simple. Plus it's in Python, which I know very well.
For anyone visiting near today's date, it can clearly be seen that the site is a bit rough and missing features. That is an artifact of using someone else's simple theme and then stripping it down a bit from there to get stuff out that I don't want. But visitors can also expect that my theme will undergo changes and improvements over time, as I learn more about the tools and languages, so there will be that to look forward to - please visit once in a while to see what's new!
And BTW, I have an "About Phil" page here. I haven't yet figured out how to get it in the top nav bar... :(