Ghost is the Most

I have been converted. I was a believer before. And now that's changed.

You see, I'm a developer. I can make my own things. I don't have to pay for someone to fix something on my site. I can do it myself.

If I want to integrate with Mailchimp. I'll do it myself. But it's not quite right with them. Maybe I'll try Email Octopus. Oh, their list management isn't quite as good. Can I rework what Mailchimp was missing?

Can you guess the problem here?

Working on instead of in your site

I found myself spending way too much time tweaking little things about my site. I would also hit unexpected problems that would take me a while to debug.

Development-wise it was a lot of fun, but progress-on-my-careerwise, it was a drain. The previous iteration of my portfolio site was a custom Gatsby/Sanity mix. It was freaking awesome. (Maybe not the design)

The problem I found was connecting custom types into Sanity. I could do it, but the whole point was to share my content. Not to create my content platform.

Enter GhostJS

I had been hearing a lot of good things about GhostJS. My main interest was in the content editor which I'm using right now. I must say it is the best I've ever used.

There are a ton of drag and drop features built in, such as YouTube embeds (just wait), Twitter, and images. You can also break down into HTML or Markdown if need be.

I streamed exploring Ghost on my local computer. You can do the same by following the instructions here.

My rule

Nothing is preventing me from going hog wild with templating on Ghost. So I've made a rule.

Until I have at least 10 blog posts and all my projects ported over to the site, I am not allowed to change anything on the theme. I added my header image, but other than that. Zilch, nothing, nada.

This way I can keep working on interesting projects and share them easily. Ghost removes all of the friction in sharing stuff and after configuring the subscribers, I've got a newsletter!

Why not WordPress?

Well, because, reasons...

Once you check out the interface of Ghost, you'll see. WordPress is a bit heavy handed for what is essentially a blog with some pages.

But also, Ghost is blazing fast and I never found WordPress to be. Plus, I could get lost in configuration again. I mean, that's essentially the problem. When you have a thousand nobs you can adjust, you lose focus on what is important.

Ghost has strong conventions, and I'm trying to stick with them.