Hi everyone! It’s been a bit of a wild ride the last few months, but I am now back on this platform and this blog. If you’re just now tuning in, let me catch you up a bit:

• Back in September, I decided I wanted to self-host my blog and move it to WordPress.com instead of WordPress.org. I also planned to change the name of the blog entirely. The reasons for these changes were two-fold: 1) I wanted to explore becoming a travel blogger, and to do that, I felt I needed to move to self-hosting, and 2) I was worried that my current blog title might stifle future growth. Sure, the ‘passport’ part is fine, but what about ‘chopsticks?’ What if I visited a country that didn’t use chopsticks, would it be weird if I wrote about it? Also, doesn’t having ‘chopsticks’ in the name mean it should be a food blog?
• In October, I made my account with a hosting site and transferred the data of my blog to that account. However, during that transfer, I lost all of my pictures. Every single one. I spent the next month going through all 162 of my posts and putting the pictures back in.
• In November, I spent days, weeks, constructing the site itself, and I finally felt good enough about my blog that I decided to make it live and start writing new content. However, the longer I spent on that platform, the less I wrote. I got too caught up in everything else, like the speed of the website, going back in to all the pictures and added Alt Text, trying to figure out how to get my website ranked higher on Google. I barely wrote anything. I was stressed and getting tired of dealing with the blog.

Now it’s December, and I’ve moved completely back! The new website is no more. Now this doesn’t mean I’ve given up completely; no, I plan to use alllll that knowledge I gained in the future. But right now, I’m content with where I am 🙂

これからもよろしくお願いします！