Moving to Ghost v2

I started this blog on Wordpress nearly 10 years ago. It was started in August in 2009 and has evolved a few times. A big step today was the upgrade to Ghost v2. While the release notes show off the feature changes, this blog serves as a tiny reminder that things are always evolving.

WordPress used to be the defacto blogging software, but today WordPress runs a scary amount of the web. The drive to never break anything has given WordPress a large market share. You can install a 2 year old plugin on a current WordPress install and it will probably work. It may throw some warnings in developer mode, but the production version of that plugin will still operate. Without forced change, WordPress has gone from a slim blogging tool to a full blown e-commerce landing page website starter kit.

WordPress simply was not for me anymore. So I moved to Ghost, then Ghost started looking a bit dated compared to the ever popular Medium.com. Individual bloggers to large corporations had blogs there, but due to the closed source feel of it - I stayed with Ghost.

Ghost hit v1.0 and added some cool features, but broke a good deal of things. A requirement on some node CLI tool to install/update was proving to be difficult to run on a server setup that I thought was fairly common. It took some hacking of the script and my server with 3 different Ghost blogs was up and running. I reported a bug and recently saw another reported with a similar problem, for these reasons I feared the next upgrade.

Breaking things though is how you grow without technical debt and Ghost is free. If I have to spend a few hours every few months to fix something, that isn't too bad. I cannot complain given how I don't pay for this software, so I'm happy reporting a bug/feature and hacking scripts so they work for myself.

Now Ghost v2 is out and it launched with a new editor & allowed native spell check to work. This editor reminds me of Medium.com editor along with the upcoming Wordpress 5.0 - Gutenberg editor. The world is moving towards "block" based writing, where text is supplemented with interactive elements.

So to end this post, I picked a random Instagram image of mine and dropped the link below. Ghost will do the rest and display it, but now I've placed a dependency on a service that may not be around in a few years.