Moving to Ghost

This week I moved baus.net to Ghost. I ran my personal website on Jekyll for years, but I found the editing workflow with Jekyll and Github pages to be more cumbersome than I expected. I thought writing in any editor and pushing to git would be better than it actually was. I like editing Markdown directly in Ghost's admin app.

I'm using a modified version of the Atilla theme which is well written and maintained. Many of the open source themes for Ghost were quite old. Ghost itself has been around for 5 years. I first looked at it seriously in 2014. Ghost is written in JavaScript, which is the language I'm using most these days, and I hope to use Ghost as a basis for other projects I'm working on.

Ghost is already 5 years old. It is a good application, but at first glance it doesn't appear all that complicated. This isn't a jab at the Ghost team, but it shows how long it takes to write production quality software, even when you have the backing of open source contributors.

Granted, Ghost solves some problems which other SaaS application do not. For instance their install procedure is one of the best of any self hosted open source application and doesn't require installing a black box container. I had it up and running on DigitalOcean in about 30 minutes.

I respect developers who can kick out production quality apps on their own, but I think this is becoming increasingly rare. While Paul Graham (of Y Combinator) used to promote ramen profitability, it seems more common for Y Combinator startups to move directly into raising money and building a team than achieving ramen profitability with a skeleton crew.

Using Ghost is a little like getting a new toy. I'm still learning the software, but I'm excited and hope to streamline publishing more content.