Ghost (and back again)
After years of running static sites, I had a brief flirtation with a hosted service.
Almost two months ago I moved this site to Ghost, and two weeks ago I moved it back. The commenting feature makes things pretty complicated — not just technically but also price-wise — and Ghost seemed like the solution, at least initially. Ghost is a fine piece of software and a great service, and I won’t hesitate to recommend it to people who just want a weblog and a place to write.
If you’re trying to choose between Ghost, Substack, Medium, or Wordpress I’d certainly suggest giving Ghost a real hard look. I think Substack and Medium see you as a conduit to your readers, and Wordpress left straight-up blogging behind at least a decade ago. I like Ghost. It just doesn’t fit my needs. I’m not entirely sure what those needs are, but it doesn’t fit them.
Choosing software that suits my purposes has been a struggle for twenty-six years. I don’t think that struggle is unique. I’ve done CMS integrations for much of my career, and I’ve seen client after client struggle with the same problem. It’s something like this:
- I just want to write stuff…
- … and not worry about managing the software or hosting …
- but I also want it to be easy to change what I don’t like about the software or hosting.
You see the tension there.
For me the sweet spot for almost a decade now has been no CMS at all. This is a great solution for me because there’s very little hosting work, I have fine-grained control of the front-end, and I also have the skills to make most of those changes “easy.”
Something very dynamic, like comments, threw that into disarray. Once you’re delivering dynamic content, you need things like databases, server caches, APIs. You start asking questions like “should I go with Vercel / Netlify and learn their architectures or should I just work directly with AWS.” I can do these things, but as a front-end developer every interaction with hosting infrastructure and back-end services feels like a chore. And this is the site I’m making for fun.
Ghost made gathering the comments easy and secure, but it came at a significant cost of complexity making the front-end changes I enjoy. Using Ghost puts me back in the world of theming a site. I’ve looked into Ghost’s theming layer enough to know I prefer it over Drupal or Wordpress, but also enough to know I’d rather not deal with it.
There were also some decisions I … disliked. For example, Ghost doesn’t allow anonymous commenters, and I’d prefer to have less friction there. Ghost is also very intensely focused on growing an audience and selling subscriptions to them. I’m fine if the former happens, but it’s not a driver for me. And I have no intentions on selling subscriptions at all.
So what’s new?
I had nearly decided that I was going to have to write my own commenting system after all, and then I found Hyvor Talk, a hosted solution that almost suits my needs but doesn’t appear to want to farm my small audience the way a service like Disqus does. I’m happy to throw some cash their way, but if I have to I guess I will ultimately create my own commenting system.
The Friday 10 lyrics game has its own home outside the normal blog archive, which should make it easier to perpetuate the illusion that I write about web development issues.
There’s also a new promo block for that game that always links to the most recent game and provides some scoring information. I couldn’t easily do this with Ghost because I had to hand-roll each game’s HTML; now I can provide clean data, which makes it easier to theme and re-purpose the results.
And while the old Ghost design might have been technically “better,” I’m glad to have my preferred font choice back and the opportunity to do much more interesting designs… if and when I find time for it. Most of the Ghost designs were clearly intended for purposes other than blogging, and they all got up my nose in one way or the other.
All in all though, I’m glad to have made this little excursion into a growing CMS I’d yet had the chance to try.