A New Home 🏡
I finally moved from Medium to a personal blog powered by Ghost.
It's been exactly one year since I posted my last article! Time flies. I was more of a consumer than a contributor these days... This bothers me a lot but it's about to change!
I started writing when I discovered Medium. It looked beautiful, it was effortless and it had a community. What more can you ask for? Medium was just amazing in many ways and it encouraged me write more.
Until it didn't...
I think Medium was too aggressive with its premium model and it ended up damaging the brand and the community. At least my perception of Medium is completely changed. This is why I started looking for options which would put me more in control. I initially experimented with GitHub Pages and Jekyll but settled with Ghost after I read this post from Seyfeddin.
In a nutshell;
- Ghost is as beautiful. I can say that editing and publishing experience is very similar to Medium, or even better.
- Setup is dead simple. It took me 2 to 3 hours to publish this website on a DigitalOcean Droplet ($5/mo) even though I have ZERO web development experience. (You can also go with Ghost Pro if you don't want to deal with all this.)
- It provides integrations with many apps and tools (MailChimp, Commento, Zapier etc.) out of the box.
- I could easily add support for code syntax highlighting, which was something bothering me in Medium for long!
- Unfortunately there's no community aspect to it, but I was ready to take the hit. 🤷♂️ Not gonna lie, I will miss having followers and receiving claps on my posts.
So far, I'm loving it and recommend Ghost to everyone. ❤️ Here are some resources that helped me a lot during development:
- Setting up Ghost with a DigitalOcean Droplet
- Adding syntax highlighting to Ghost
- Ghost comes with a beautiful default theme. I am currently using it with small tweaks. You can easily buy different themes or write it from scratch using Handlebars.
- I used Figma for any design work.
Now that I have a new home... See you soon!