Hello, Ghost!

Ahoy newsletter subscribers and drive-by viewers! I have some fun Egee news to share:

Egee.io runs on Ghost (and DigitalOcean) now

So, I’ve been planning a big infrastructure migration project and I wanted also do a platform refresh since I had the hood up anyway. WordPress is a cool platform but I ran into lots of little issues that made me look for alternatives.

Enter: Ghost.io

Ghost is like a self-hosted Patreon. That's the entire value proposition for content creators; it’s for folks who want platform independence. WordPress supports this too, but their implementation is clunky and expensive unless you know the ins & outs of their ecosystem.

My first website ran on WordPress(.com) but I also experimented with Ghost along side it. It was an early version and it lacked a lot of features. I ended up going with a custom EmberJS website because it used the same html templating language (handlebars) as Ghost.

This new Ghost is a completely different animal. It’s positioning itself as a Patreon alternative, which aligns perfectly with my long-term strategy for Egee.xyz and Egee.io.

What’s Next?

I’ve migrated subscribers and updated DNS so hopefully everyone should see and view this post on the new Ghost website. The biggest unknown is around media.

Videos should be emends pointing back to YouTube; no changes there. Images are typically hosted on the website (WordPress) so I’m pretty sure that means most media in older posts are broken.

The best and next thing I need to do is post! WordPress made you click around a lot just to make a post. I can tell already with Ghost there’s less friction and I hope that means more casual postings. Ghost has native ActivityPub integration too, I think I just need to plug it in!