Still the default because the extension ecosystem covers everything — linting, live preview, Git diffing — without switching windows. The one real complaint: on larger repos it gets sluggish until I prune unused extensions every few months.

This is the one I’m most honest about: I don’t use it to “write my articles,” I use it for research structuring, first-draft scaffolding, and catching claims I need to go verify before publishing. Every draft still gets read, fact-checked, and rewritten by me — see the About page for the full disclosure. For comparing it against alternatives, see our AI model comparison.

Runs this site and the rest of the portfolio on their managed WordPress (DreamPress) tier. The draw was built-in caching and staging without needing a separate plugin stack — the real limitation is support response time during traffic spikes, which is the trade-off of the price point versus the premium managed hosts.

Registrar for codetalenthub.io and the rest of the domain portfolio — mainly for the renewal pricing being predictable instead of jumping after year one. Full comparison against alternatives in Budget Hosting & Domains.

Analytics, Search Console, and ad monetization in one WordPress plugin instead of three separate dashboards. Genuinely the one tool on this page you can verify yourself — it’s visible in this site’s own page source.

Contracts, invoicing, and time tracking in one place — solved the actual problem, which wasn’t late payments, it was scope creep with no paper trail to point back to. The contract templates alone paid for a year of the subscription the first time a scope dispute came up.

The editorial calendar and source-tracking database for every article across the portfolio lives here. The actual time-saver isn’t the writing — it’s being able to check, before publishing, whether a stat or source has already been used and needs re-verifying against a newer number.

Client logins, API keys, and hosting credentials across a dozen-plus sites. Not exciting, but the daily save is never re-typing a password into a WordPress admin login at 11pm.