Some of you may have noticed the redesign. The GOATs who use RSS definitely haven't lol. Either way, the new tech stack is using Ghost hosted on Synaps Media.
What happened to Wordpress?
What a mighty fine question indeed. Though I have used Wordpress for all my sites for a long while, there are a few reasons. The first is plugin hell, you can't use WordPress without a bazillion plugins (it reminds me of browsers, but I digress). WordPress itself is just bloated AF, everything is just laggy and broken. I wasn't particularly scared about the Wordpress drama as I think there would have been some open source fork if it didn't work out. But needless to say it didn't help.
Why Ghost and not the readers SSG of choice
I still wanted a CMS for more flexibility than a SSG. (See my gallery and TechReccs pages).
I also found some really nice themes that I didn't have to edit 100 things from scratch. Sorry for being lazy.
Theme
Ghost themes are my style in general. It seems most designers have a similar aesthetic to mine. Just like when shopping for a theme for WordPress, I recommend finding devs that seem to know what they are doing and then choosing themes from those devs. As opposed to hunting for themes you like and finding one only to find out it's coded terribly. Here are some of the themes I looked at:
- https://themeforest.net/item/vozzy-neobrutalism-lightweight-ghost-theme/51168877
- https://themeforest.net/item/zento-modern-lightweight-blog-for-wordpress/51579969?s_rank=2
- https://themeforest.net/item/wavy-modern-lightweight-blog-for-ghost/48834605?s_rank=5
- https://themeforest.net/item/groovy-modern-lightweight-blog-for-ghost/39997317?s_rank=7
- https://themeforest.net/item/airo-minimal-theme-for-ghost/24238450?s_rank=13
- https://themeforest.net/item/edger-modern-lightweight-blog-for-ghost/55049568?s_rank=1
- https://preview.themeforest.net/item/yamal-blog-magazine-ghost-theme/full_screen_preview/54505386
I ended up going with Braun from Themex after viewing actual user sites and not just prebuilt Demos.
I am glad I did, the site turned out exactly how I wanted it to. It's programmed well, is easy to modify, and the Dev is super responsive and helpful. Not to mention, his documentation is absolutely fantastic!
Self-hosting adventures
As an avid self-hosted I thought what the heck why would I pay for a managed provider I can just do it myself, right...... Well, it all started well. I picked up a cheap hosting offer from Lowendbox. Spun up my server, did the updates, and landed on Easypanel for my glorified docker frontend. I got everything setup properly for Ghost 5 with the exceptions of email newsletters which I didnt bother with. I was using Goatcounter for some Basic-Analytics and got to setting up my theme and migrating over my blog posts. I started with Cloudflare Free as my CDN but quickly switched to Bunny as I saw significant performance improvements for very, very cheap. I used the tutorials at https://www.techweirdo.net/ which is apparently down now, though I don't know why.
Then Ghost 6 happened, which I was super excited for, but just couldn't get to work. I messed with my Traefik config for many, many hrs and just could not get ActivityPub to work. I got so frustrated at one point I started looking for managed hosting but everything was out of reach budget wise until I found Synaps Media.
Hosted Ghost with Synaps Media
I have nothing but good things to say. The price is right at just 48 Euros a year. There is a blog post on how he is able to keep it that cheap, as I was concerned it was to good to be true.
The backend UI is turnkey and just freaking works while looking great. Nameservers/DNS were so simple that I had to reach out to customer support as I was overthinking it too much, how could it be so simple! Customer support is fantastic, and I am 99 percent sure he is using Bunny as the CDN, as my performance was almost exactly the same on time to first byte as when I was self-hosting with bunny.
Activity-pub and newsletter just works out of the box and I have had zero downtime or issues over the past month or so of using it.
Did I mention the support, the guy running it is great and helped me figure out how to change my Bluesky profile, which isn't natively supported in the Ghost backend
Ghost Itself - 99 percent Good
I freaking love Ghost. I dont know how else to describe it but just a breath of fresh air. It's an opinionated platform that has a great underlying fundamental structure. Things like auto creating different size images, having logos work properly, having tagging in posts, and proper built in search are some of the many reasons I just love it . It's quite sad that these type's of basic things can't be taken for granted. The editor being clean and simple as well as supporting markdown is just a godsend. The ability to connect with things like Zapier make it able to be more powerful without being a gargantuan-bloated mess. Two things that i have been using are Echofeed to automatically post to my main Fediverse account in addition to my blog's Fediverse account. And Letterbird as my contact form.
Native user, comments, newsletter and subscriptions are also really nice.Ghost just makes sense, and does what it's supposed to do while being easily customizable.
The constant push of SEO slop is not there and that makes me happy!
Two Tiny Downsides
Not having a Native contact form and, for self-hosting, forcing Mail-gun are the only downsides I have found with Ghost.
In short
I love the CMS, the maintainers,the vision and the surrounding community.
Make Human content, not clanker slop.
And that's a wrap. Bye for now.
AY
This is day 37 of #100DaysToOffload
