February 15, 2014

A New Start

(Making the Arrested Development reference in the title there was damn tempting, but nope, didn’t go for it.)

I’m not a huge blogger, I know that. I’ve been installing and running away from I guess around 10 to 20 blogs in the last few years (I can at least find one of the remnants to still be online, probably due to the fact that this is the only instance I didn’t host myself) and have had a lot more fun playing around with the software itself than writing, although I always aim to change that. I guess I could write a few sentences about why I think this time might be different, but I’ve written those over and over again as well. But what I do know is that at least the software is different this time. It’s not just another Wordpress installation, it’s Ghost.

There’s a few things pushing me towards using Ghost as a blogging platform. It has to be something free and open, something I could host myself, something without a lot of bullshit that comes with it (sorry Wordpress and every other CMS out there), something that supports markdown, something that is managed over a browser (sorry Octopress1), something that doesn’t push me towards writing novels for everything (sorry Medium (yeah I know, not really a blog… (and yes, nested parentheses!))), something that is still customizeable (sorry, Svtble) and as an added bonus, something that’s built on top of Node.js.

Ghost is a perfect fit. The minimality (if that is a word) of it just makes me happy on a level that I can’t yet really appreciate fully. But I will, I’m sure of that. The one thing I’m not entirely sure about yet however is if I’m going to be hosting it on ghost.org or myself. Here it’s stable and will be kept updated even if I forget, but it costs money. Well, it’s going to cost me money in every case, I’ll just run through the 30 day trial and make up an opinion on the go I guess.

So much for now, here goes nothing!

P.S. One downside are the missing comments. But everything is open source, so it shouldn’t be much of an issue forking the default theme on Github and adding Disqus. I’ll keep that in mind for the future.


  1. My main computer just died and while it’s in the Apple Store being fixed for a ridiculous amount of money, pushing new content to my Octopress running inside a Github repo is more of a hassle than anything else. Getting my SSH key out of my backup for starters and then installing Ruby/rake? No thanks. ↩︎