Tech

Site Update: Move to Ghost

Brian Stucki

Brian Stucki

— 2 min read

After 21 years of blogging on Wordpress, I decided to move to Ghost. It's strange to be using another platform. I installed my first wordpress blog in 2003 soon after the initial release.

But things have changed a lot on the Wordpress front. I decided it was time to try something new. In short, I wanted something more simple. I had 21 years of cruft stacked up in my databases and themes. Wordpress itself has also become too complex with plugins, Jetpack, and other add-ons.

I just want to add photos and text and have it look nice. Ghost delivers on that front with a very simple editor.

Some Notes on the Move

  • The Wordpress Export plugin for Ghost made it super easy to move data.
  • Ghost uses tags instead of categories so be sure to convert those before exporting.
  • I moved from self-hosted Wordpress (on a Mac mini) to a sort of self-hosted Ghost on PikaPods. For me, this is the right balance between upkeep, access, and price. (Pikapods is really fun to use as well.)
  • Ghost is geared toward newsletters, free or paid. I don't do paid newsletters. (I'm happy enough when someone just pays attention.) I do appreciate how nice the emails look though. All of my current subscribers made the jump over without issue.
  • Ghost also has really nice support for redirects. Thanks to this option, I also used this chance to:
    • move from a subfolder (/blog) to no subfolder
    • remove the www from the blog url
    • point the old RSS feed to the new RSS feed
  • All of my wordpress subscribers were able to import to the newsletter here without issue. It's only used to receive each new post to an email inbox.
Brian Stucki (@stucki@mastodon.social)
Year after year, you accept the increasing domain renewal price at Hover until you realize it’s just too much. Ten minutes later and a a dozen domains are zipping over to Porkbun…
Mastodon
  • As part of the move, I also transferred all of my domains from Hover to Porkbun. It's about half the price and offers additional DNS features that I needed. This includes:
    • support for ALIAS records
    • the ability to forward a URL that includes the security and the URL path in the redirection. This means https://www.domain.com/path will forward to https:/domain/path without issue. Not an easy thing to setup on your own but Porkbun made it simple.

Conclusion

Overall, I am happy with the move. I'm still learning about the platform but it's mostly up and running. (If you see anything broken, I'd love a quick note on what you found.)

We'll know I did it right if most readers don't notice anything at all.