New year, new (spooky) personal site 👻

For 10+ years I've been hand rolling my own blog and it's been...fine. My site was never going to win any design awards, but it was always fast, readable, and accessible. I used Jekyll + Github Pages for a while and more recently Hugo + Cloudflare to write/publish/host.

I didn't have any major complaints with that setup, but I did notice there was a slight overhead of writing markdown + deploying + having to fuss with anything that wasn't pure text (embeds, images, files, etc.). That overhead certainly wasn't the only reason (laziness) I didn't write much, but it was at least a contributing factor. So then I would usually just take whatever half-baked thought I had and post it to Bluesky or Threads (before I was reminded of what an asshole Zuck is and deleted my account) and leave it at that.

But posting mechanics aside, the crux of all of this is that I really wanted to get back to publishing, hosting, and owning my own content, effectively being the canonical source of whatever I create (I largely credit The Verge for continuing to push that message and making me think about it). I mean it's not like my Bluesky posts are anything special, but all social posts are inherently ephemeral and hard to manage long term, so why not re-take control of all that while also sharing some semi-baked ideas and getting back to real writing?

Finding a not-scary publishing platform 👻

I looked at all the common players for publishing but man it's bleak out there. Medium is a sucky experience every time I visit it (why am I always getting prompted with a login screen), there was no way I was going to use Wordpress after all their bullshit, Substrack is gross, and Squarespace was the wrong vibe and seemed to focus mostly on marketing and selling.

Weary and somewhat defeated, I eventually stumbled onto Ghost. I'm not sure what got me over there, but oh my, what was this gem?! Open source, modern, nice templates, a really nice editor, and clean but robust authoring tools – yes please! It costs a very reasonable $108 a year for hosting and that money goes toward supporting a sustainable, non-profit. That's money well spent.

I've spent about a week overall with Ghost and so far it's great. It does a nice job of toeing the line between simple content management and robust features, which is always a tricky balance. It lets you customize just about everything you would need to without giving you everything under the sun that would make it painful to work with (Wordpress). It's fast and reliable, and perhaps the biggest compliment I can give it is that I've really enjoyed using it and building a site on it.

So here we are, a shiny new blog and with a lovely new look. Since it's so nice here and so easy to post, I'd like to think I'll be posting a lot more (famous last words). In terms of content, it's likely going to be my typical rants about tech, remote work, life as a dad, and all the shit that enrages me. But I'm also hoping to post a lot more photos and media that was harder to do before (especially pictures of my dog Eugene). And who knows, maybe if folks start to subscribe it'll be a virtuous cycle of posting. 🤞