Why I Left Ghost - and the process of moving my blog
Ghost is a beautiful piece of software for blogs, newsletters, and publications alike. There's a reason why modern publications like 404 Media and Platformer choose to host their sites on Ghost, rather than something like WordPress. Actually, Ghost is a lot like a modern reimagining of what WordPress could be if it never stopped focusing on the core idea of hosting publications, rather than expanding to more generic websites as well.
That's why when originally choosing where to host my blog, I chose to do so using Ghost. It had all the features I needed and was the right amount of simple and easy-to-use while still being extremely functional. It was perfect for my use case at the time. The only downside for me was the cost. While $11/month wasn't a bad price for its features, since I wasn't posting very often, I was mostly just paying to keep it up.
But use cases change, and so does what you want software to do.
As time went on, I started to want to customize my blog a bit more. I couldn't make a custom theme for Ghost because the plan I was on didn't allow that, so unless I wanted to pay an extra $20 per month, I'd have to inject style code into the HTML of the site myself. It's basically a hackier and more limiting way of adding a little bit more customization to my site. I mostly just used it to remove a couple of buttons and play with the font.
I also wanted to start taking my blogging a little less seriously. Up until this point, I've called my blog posts "posts" or "articles" and my blog was marketed more as a weird one-person "publication" of sorts. But I found I didn't really care for this in the long term as it added unnecessary pressure for these posts to be super polished and informative and I just wanted to blog and rant, you know? Like I wouldn't have written "you know?" because my blog was a bit more formal.
As I started thinking about my blog in this way, Ghost just felt like overkill for me. Especially as I started thinking of other ways I could host my blog for free. And over the past couple of years, there have been some great new ways to host simple blogs super easily. There is even a pretty cool simple blogging platform called weblog.lol built into a service I already pay for (omg.lol)! These services were great, and they were almost what I was looking for, but they weren't quite perfect. And you know what they say...
If you want something done right, do it yourself.
What I ended up doing is custom-coding my blog myself. Well... with a little help from some friends. The base of my website, which includes the original code and design, was made by me. But I'm using Eleventy, a static site generator, to make it easy to update the whole website at once or write a new post without coding anything. For example, I've set it up to automatically generate the "Recent Posts" section to always show the most recent blog posts I've written. And I write my posts using basic Markdown, which 11ty automatically converts into a webpage for the post.
I want to be clear that Eleventy is not for everyone, as it requires a bit of technical knowledge to get set up. But if you want to make a simple little website that's easy to update and you already know some HTML and CSS, go for it.
Of course, 11ty doesn't host your website anywhere on the internet; it just spits out some HTML files for you to upload somewhere else. But once you have the files for a static website, it's super easy to find somewhere that'll host it for free since static pages aren't all that resource intensive. Heck, you could even host it on a Raspberry Pi, which I've tested out and works great as long as you're fine keeping your Raspberry Pi and its internet connection up and running (I didn't opt for this because it would just be a bit annoying to manage keeping my site up myself when someone else could host it for me for free and probably keep the website up better than I ever could, but it's absolutely a viable option).
I'm excited to post more on my blog - and potentially tweak the design a bit here and there too. But that's all from me for now. I hope to be posting more blog posts in the future about... well, whatever I want.
