Ghost Out, WordPress In (and back out again)
Note: This post has been in my drafts since March 2021. The points relating to Ghost are still valid but I won’t be talking about Wordpress as I originally intended. Therefore the title of this post is a bit convoluted.
As you might have noticed the blogging platform has changed again. This was a snap decision after the release of Ghost 4.0. Ghost has moved from being a simple CMS for blogging to more of a CMS mimicking Substack or Medium where you have users who pay for your content. This is not what I want from my blogging platform, no one will ever want to pay for my random drivel. It has moved increasingly away from what it was when I moved to it and the new release was the last straw.
“Turn your audience into a business.” is the new tagline at ghost.org and that’s not what I want and that’s how all that UI and UX is setup to be. Email newsletters are now natively built into Ghost. I never want to email a single person who stumbles across my blog. I already feel bad that they read it at all.
Memberships and subscriptions are now natively part of the core platform. On the Ghost website it says that publishers who started sites with Ghost last year are now making more than $2Million per year in revenue from the platform. I am not here to make money that is what my day job is for. This is just for a lark or a best a chuckle.
“The dashboard you’ve been waiting for.” The dashboard went from something useful where you could see some relevant info about your blog and a new post button. The new one is just littered with “detailed stats on audience engagement and business growth”. I don’t need this info at all and I don’t think there is a way to turn it off.
This is the part where I would have talked up Wordpress which I did move to and with this post have moved away from. This new website is Hugo with the Congo theme so it’s both a blog and a homepage. Not much to say about Hugo, it just works and let’s use what ever tool I want to write my posts with. The backend is pretty simple and manual at the moment, I might look into automating the rebuilding of the site on push but that is for another day.
- Michael