Making my Site a Ghost

Well, thismightnotmatter.com is finally on Ghost!

I say finally because I've been thinking about using Ghost since late 2023 but am just now getting around to it.

But it's done!

I ended up going with Ghost (Pro) because I only trust my networking/self-hosting skills for my own personal stuff right now. I still have a lot to learn before I trust hosting something I want people to actually visit anytime and not worry about messing up some configuration. I'll give self-hosting another go in the future though.

So how'd it go?

Once I entered the necessary personal/payment info I was delivered to an onboarding screen and guided through some basic setup.

I was initially not enthused with the site "builder" because of it's lack of customization but, honestly, forcing me to focus on the content rather than customization is probably more of a blessing than a curse.

I should mention that there is a lot more customization available if you use a custom theme or design your own but I'll consider that once I have million upon millions of raving fans.

I then updated by DNS records to point thismightnotmatter.com to the Ghost site and ported over my existing posts from the old site.

The first post was exceedingly easy, it was already in markdown so I just created a markdown block in the Ghost editor and copy/pasted. The second post.... not so easy.

This had nothing to do with Ghost or Hugo, just my own past technological tinkering.

When I setup the Hugo site, I used Cloudflare Images so the pictures would load extremely fast no matter where someone was loading the page in the world. This setup worked beautifully and made for a delightfully quick loading experience. However:

CF Images uses tags in place of standard markdown image pointers so Cloudflare knows which image to load from their servers in place of the tag. Meaning that my blog post didn't have any of the original photos. Meaning that I had to go back through the blog post and manually put each photo back.

It took 2 tedious hours but it at least let me revisit the writing which was nice.

Now there is one thing about Ghost (Pro) which is quite annoying.

I signed-up using the 14 day free trial and used a custom theme during that period. But once the two weeks was up I learned that using anything other than the default theme requires a higher tier "business account".

So that's kinda sucks but this is should be about the content, not the site design.

Other than that, I really don't have anything else to report.

I'm writing and posting this blog post to get me out of a demotivated slump of not finishing what I write. I have a lot of good ideas that I want to flesh out and post but its hard getting to it when writing isn't your main source of income and you don't have Casey Neistat levels of energy.

The last thing I'll mention is that all my posts will be free for the foreseeable future but the comment section (powered by the fediverse 😎) is members only. Meaning you'll have to give me an email address to send post notifications to if you want to comment.