I spent this afternoon moving my websites from a shared host to a LAMP stack on a DigitalOcean VPS (ref. link). In the process, I had to decide whether I wanted to stick with WordPress or move to a platform with a more simple writing experience, like Ghost or Jekyll. As of now, I’m running both WordPress and Ghost side by side. My main problem with WordPress was that each post felt like an article. It depersonalized my blog and made it more of a collection articles rather than a place for me to express my opinions and thoughts. My hope is that, with Ghost, I’ll be able to find the midpoint between an entirely personal blog (essentially a public journal) and an entirely expository blog.

I chose Ghost over Jekyll because I wanted to minimize the amount of work spent on the blog outside of writing actual content. Another one of the reasons WordPress became such an annoyance was the complexity of its theme and plugin systems and the amount of maintence that was necessary to keep them up and running. I was writing child themes, page templates, and custom plugins and it all became too overwhelming and complicated. With Ghost, all of the settings fit neatly into one config file and one page of settings. While I like the idea of writing my posts in Markdown files and storing them in a flat-file database, the work involved in setting Jekyll up and writing YAML front matter for posts deterred me from using it in production.

Anyways, I guess the point is I chose Ghost because it offers the most minimal and simplistic experience of the three and hopefully that will encourage me to write more.