Transitioning to Ghost

Hey all! Life has been crazy over the past 6 months or so. The blogging has been hardly a priority. One of the hurdles was that I was feeling really disincentivized to invest in my old site much.

For the past year I've been using Obsidian Publish. As an Obsidian user, it has been great to lower the barrier to entry to publishing things on the web. I would simply take notes, hit the Publish button, and boom! Whatever I was writing for myself is now available on the internet!

From a website perspective, I rapidly started hitting the limits of Publish however. Changing the look and feel of the site was incredibly manual. Having no ability to change the order of things in the menu was frustrating, requiring me to alphanumerically organize everything to get it how I wanted. Also being unable to link out to other sites in the menu became frustrating. So really what I'm complaining about is the lack of customization as a website. As a note-taking tool, I still recommend Obsidian however.

I'm also weirdly thankful for Obsidian Publish. It integrated into my flow so well and really encouraged me to write publicly.

For a while I was messing with Astro. Astro is great—especially if you're willing to put in the technical time. Turns out I am not willing. The ability to throw up an Astro sites on Netlify, GitHub Pages, etc for free forever remains very tempting. Saving ~$15/mo ended up not being worth it to me.

So far Ghost—specifically Ghost Pro—has been wonderful. Everything has been so easy. The project is open-source. The templates are as attractive and complex as they need to be. The sites load rapidly. And if I ever want to move to another platform I have the ability to export my site and all its content. Not to mention the email newsletter integration. What more could you ask for?

The downside to the Obsidian Publish -> Ghost transition is that it is manual. Be patient with me as I move content over! Also an interesting challenge is deciding what is worth moving over. I was and will continue to use Obsidian as a second brain. It is inherently not a "blog" so it doesn't make sense to move everything here.

Anyway thanks for reading and I look forward to the future of my site! 😄