Moving to Ghost

After about 5 years of blogging using a static site engine, I decided to move back to a normal blogging platform. I guess there really is nothing new under the sun and everything just keeps moving in cycles. Sure, this time the platform is node.js based, not PHP, but those are details.

I've been wanting to move for about two years. First and foremost, because Acrylamid, the SSE I was using, became deprecated, meaning it wouldn't get any more updates. It had some odd bugs here and there, it was stuck on Python 2.7, so it was time to find something new.

It took me two years to move because I have a lot of hand made stuff for Acrylamid. I have more than 300 posts and I use a custom gallery filter, a custom search implementation and I wrote a bit of math and some code in those posts. I kept searching for something that would enable me to move easily, that would have all the features I was looking for and so on.

Initially I was looking for another SSE, something like Zola, which is written in Rust. But because I have lots of custom stuff (and because Acrylamid has a weird frontmatter syntax), moving to another SSE is actually kinda difficult.

Another problem I had was that writing posts when not at home was always a bit clunky. Sure, I have a Docker file for running Acrylamid, but there were always issues, such as image galleries not working properly because the images are only on my main machine. And to be fair, I kinda got bored of the command line. Always having to activate a virtualenv, always fighting Vim's paste system, making sure image links are inserted correctly and so on.

So, having plenty of reasons to move away, I finally decided that during these two weeks of winder break, I will move to the Ghost blogging platform. I liked the UI. It should help with posting more easily, from anywhere. Hopefully this means I'll also post more often.

For now, I have moved only about 30 posts over to this new interface. Comments are enabled, but search is not.

If you see anything badly broken, leave a comment. If you really miss something, send me a message and I'll prioritize moving it over to Ghost.

To many new posts in 2020!