ghost - Mike's Site

If you've ever worked with me, you know that playing with small to medium content management systems is a hobby of mine. Last year I settled on Kirby as my system of choice for running my own website. However, I was keeping my blog on a Digital Ocean droplet running Node and Ghost.

Ghost is definitely a more modern, slick system that I've been really pleased with. But I did want to consolidate things into a single site. So my new blog and RSS feed are operated on the same Kirby system as the rest of my site. If nothing else, I didn't have to learn anything about the server, the templating tools, or anything else in order to get it redesigned and fit in. Flexibility was important — now I can have my own fields and post types pretty easily.

And since both systems are reliant on Markdown for content and Ghost has a handy simple JSON export, porting was not a big deal. Let me know if you see any issues.

A new blog again.

I briefly tried Octopress, a variation on Jekyll that generates a static-file blog. It's the bees knees in principle but I just can't make all the Ruby dependencies work. I've gotten into a lot of compiled web technologies lately; it's mostly Node-based stuff like LESS, Jade, etc., but this made me feel a little like an idiot. At the end of the day I'm a designer.

I'm really into the idea of Tumblr in some ways — namely speed, ease, and price — but the whole concept of being hosted by one of the big guys has started to get a little weird in the wake of Snowden, and I'm actually looking to do something a little more high-touch than just "Reblog this" and "click the bookmarklet here."

And now, the rise of cheap clouds like Digital Ocean have enabled a lot of flexibility for someone with some general tech knowledge (but not enough to use a Ruby-generated static site with Github for "blogging anywhere").

So I'm trying out Ghost.

WordPress is just not an option anymore, because it's an awful, heavy, security-hole-ridden mess that is fine for pushing on a client with a shared hosting environment but if you just wanna blog? not so much.

I do think my friends who watch my blog are pretty much limited to "the ones using Tumblr also", so I can't say whether moving away from it is a plus or not.

I'll probably make my own theme before too long, but I don't really know Handlebars and such, so right now this one's pretty nice.

At any rate... Off I go.

#ghost

Unifying the systems. Or something

Uh oh