Why I Switched My Blog From Wordpress To Ghost

As you can probably see, this blog runs on ghost. I already have a blog that’s part of my website, but I decided to separate out my blog from the rest of this site. My site runs on WordPress, which I’ve been using for many years, so why did I decide to switch over?

Markdown

The problem I faced with my old blog is that I simply didn’t want to write in it. Yes, I’m lazy and I love to procrastinate, but there’s something to be said about the experience of writing and enjoying the act of writing. I don’t like writing in my WordPress site. I just don’t. It feels like a chore and it doesn’t feel natural.

On the other hand, I love markdown. Let me say that again: I LOVE markdown. As someone who’s used to writing code every day, I love how simple it is to write in markdown. I feel I write much faster and there’s a shorter connection between my thoughts and the keyboard. The simplicity of the markdown let’s me concentrate on the text and on what I’m writing. At the same time, markdown has hierarchy and styling baked into it, which makes it great to quickly structure your text with your just your keyboard.

Anyways, Ghost comes with markdown out of the box, and even has a nice preview screen where you can see what’s going on. Love it.

Simplicity

After trying out the Ghost backend, I was surprised by how simple and minimal it is. It would be terrible for anything slightly more complicated, but for my blog it was perfect.

I loved how everything looked nice right out of the box. For the near future, I’m not planning on changing absolutely anything in it. Maybe some CSS to make look a bit more like my site, but that’s probably it. This out-of-the-box minimalistic view is what ultimately lead me to Ghost over Jekyll, a static site generator also used for blogs. The Casper theme was exactly what I wanted, and the fact that I didn’t have to do anything to install it or configure was great.

The Technology Stack

I’m a developer, so for me what things like what programming language and what database my site uses is very important. We all know PHP and the WordPress stack is growing increasingly irrelevant. Yes, it powers about 20% of the sites in the world, but honestly, who cares?

New, interesting projects (that will be the WordPress of the future!) won’t be built in the LAMP stack. As someone’s who’s spent some time working on the LAMP stack and is starting to run away from it as quickly as possible, I’m happy to be using a platform that’s a bit more exciting and a bit more future-proof. I’m in love with Node.js, npm and Javascript, so I’m also very happy to have my blog in Ghost.

Setting up the site, was incredibly easy. I used Digital Ocean’s one click setup to get started and used their guide to setup my domain. Pretty simple stuff if you’ve used DO and know your way around the command line. We’ll see how easy it is when I need to version control it, extend its functionality and customize my theme!

Ghost For Developers

Having said all this, I think I would still recommend WordPress to someone who’s not technical and doesn’t know about programming or unless that person is absolutely sure they don’t want to change anything in their site. That’s the beauty of WordPress. If you want to setup a site and want to extend it, there are so many ways to extend WordPress with themes and plugins that it doesn’t make much sense for non-developers to use anything else!

But, thankfully, I’m a developer. I can use Ghost!

Conclusion

If you want a simple blog, like markdown and you’re a developer try Ghost. It’s easy to set-up and you’ll love it!