This is the 4th time in 2 years that I have changed my blog, because I am indecisive (probably) and I can't stick to one thing for a long time.
But I guarantee, this blog is going to stay. A few words about the setup - The site is hosted in a GCP instance, and the blog is set up with Ghost.
I first heard about Ghost from this tweet:
wow. really amazing the level of transparency of @ghost https://t.co/tja6OFFAol pic.twitter.com/WeWn8QpNmR
— Dinis Cruz (@DinisCruz) January 26, 2020
Why not Wordpress though?
I have been using Wordpress since the beginning. Although Wordpress boasts of being widely available, and content rich, it is definitely more than just a blogging platform, but there is no native way of dealing with memberships, SEO and subscriptions (why do I even expect that in my site?) and you have to dive into a sea of plugins until you can get it working. With Ghost, they come built-in.
And yeah, I wanted to try something new. There, I said it!
Setting up Ghost was pretty easy. They have a crystal clear documentation and their installer also sets up other necessary things (Nginx configuration, Systemd configuration and SSL with Let's Encrypt!).
The UI is intuitive and clutter free. The themes are ... very few, unlike the vast ocean of Wordpress, but their docs make it very easy to make one for yourself (not like I'm going to make one though).
Although I soon ran into an issue. In order to have membership work, I need to set up mailing which at this moment can only occur through Mailgun. I'm not very fond of using Mailgun, since I already have a SendGrid account. Turns out I can set up and use my own mail server, it affects only the membership emails. The newsletters are still sent through Mailgun :/
Overall, I am pretty pleased with the experience. Now, if only I can stop being lazy, I can probably maintain this blog.
