Gersande Is Going Ghost.org

I decided to do something wonderfully reckless today. After more than 5 years with a Wordpress website, I jumped ship. My website was becoming really resource-heavy, costing more and more to maintain smoothly. I kept having issues where mySQL would run out of memory and crash everything, usually right after I uploaded a new post:

Whereas I needed a 3GB (!!?!@#!) Digital Ocean VPS (virtual private server) to run my website smoothly before, ghost seems to be running perfectly with 512MB. That's a very important decrease in resources my wallet will especially appreciate.

The most difficult decision I had to make was whether or not I was going to bring my old Wordpress blog posts over. I decided, as I was going through the process of exporting Wordpress posts and figuring out how to export and import thousands of images, that it simply wasn't going to be worth it. I have a backup of my posts that I will be keeping locally. I went through my writing and collected the few posts I felt proud of. I may also rewrite a few old posts and release them here once more when I feel ready. Letting all of that baggage go is somewhat cathartic, if also very bittersweet. I will be moving forward, splitting my blogging between arrowhead (for very personal business) and here (for business business).

There are, of course, a few other reasons why Ghost.org is a superior choice for blog reasons:

• ghost doesn't have to be commandline-heavy, but it can be. this makes it a really nice choice over jekyll or even octopress - because I'm so used to entering blog posts via a web interface, I like the simplicity of it - but I also like having the commandline, as this has many many advantages for those who are commandline-savvy

• http://handlebarsjs.com/ - handlebars is kinda like html on crack - one of the reasons i liked using php was because of stuff like <?php include('stuff in the footer i don't wanna copy-paste a million times') ?> and handlebars has their own fancy-pants version : {{ghost_footer}}

Handlebars is a semantic web template system, started by Yehuda Katz in 2010. Source Handlebars.js is a superset of Mustache, and can render Mustache templates in addition to Handlebars templates. While Mustache is a logicless templating language, Handlebars adds extensibility and minimal logic, such as #if, #unless, #with, and #each helpers.

• While writing in Markdown and using the Jetpack plugin to convert it to HTML is incredibly buggy and annoying in that bloody stupid Kitchen Sink WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) post editor, writing Markdown posts for Ghost is actually a pleasure. It may be an effect of the "new-ness" but I do believe the fact that the full screen blog post editor is the GUI (graphical user interface) version of an orgasm.

• nginx - though this was less my own choice and more Digital Ocean's because I used the "one button install" instead of configuring everything on my own. I'm really starting to get bored of Apache's nightmarish configurations. (Also, why is it called Apache? I'm pretty sure that it has nothing to do with the American Indian culture?!)

• when I first discovered ghost.org (at the time I believe it was ghost.io) it did not have enough 'features' (oh lol) to justify moving at the time, but the fact that there was a blogging platform being built on top of node.js was very exciting. I've been doing some poking around and looking at the Planned Features for ghost is really exciting. I'm hoping, nonetheless and perhaps despite that list I just linked to, that ghost will remain as lightweight as possible and that most functionality will be easily built through the "Apps" functionality they are building.

September feels like a good time for these changes. Looking forward to this new journey with ghost.