UPDATE, December 22, 2024: Corrected a few things based on a reply from the person who hosts Magic.Pages!
MagicPages.co is a Ghost hosting site, and they offer both reasonable pricing, plus a 14-day free trial. Today, I signed up for the trial and created a mock version of this very blog. I tweaked the default theme a bit, made a post, then duplicated an existing post from here to see how easy it was or wasn’t, and how it looked vs. WP.
Here are my initial takes.
Pro:
Clean, simple interface. WP has a ton of cruft and junk I never use, and the thing I do most often–post–is not made particularly easy or accessible. Ghost streamlines everything down to a minimalist UI that makes it simple to write posts.
More options are always close by. It’s only a click away to do more complex formatting or access other features. Again, the UI feels honed, and focused.
It has a nice selection of themes, and you can create your own (though it’s not that simple).
No plugins needed! It has image-handling options that are much nicer than WP’s, and they’re just there.
If you want to have members/subscriptions, it’s easy to set up.
ActivityPub integration is being worked on, meaning I could blog and share easily to Mastodon, the one social media site I haven’t completely abandoned (yet).
I can use all emojis, to excess. Always to excess.
Con:
Most themes are locked behind a higher-priced tier, as are custom themes. Wrong! The head of Magic.Pages, Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki, wrote to me to let me know all of Ghost’s official themes are supported in the Starter plan. The Pro plan is required for custom themes.
The number of fonts is limited. I’m not sure how easy it is to add more (edit: It looks like it requires haxing the backend to a degree).
While the UI is great, the overall level of customization seems lower overall. I love tweaking, but maybe too much, so this isn’t necessarily a con.
How do I turn off the copious subscribe buttons? One is enough.
No easy way to import my WP site, which begs the question, what would I do with the old site? I am not going to manually copy over 5,400+ posts. Probably. (Note: Ghost.org does offer importing, but only with their even-more-expensive tiers.) UPDATE: Yearly plans do get support for importing, so I was basically wrong here, too.
The two cards it supports are for the worst social media platforms: Facebook and X.
Overall, I think the pros outweigh the cons, but I am fussy and unsure. I have about two weeks to make up my mind about this specific host, though.
I didn’t realize Blogstatic has an 8-day free trial, but it does! I have two days left on mine, and while I was initially enthused about it, because it seemed to tick so many boxes, I find it has some issues:
I don’t particularly like any of the few themes it offers
Customization is rather limited
I don’t want to go deep into the plumbing to modify a theme more to my liking
Limited image support (no lightbox or click-to-enlarge support that I can see, though it’s possible I’m just a big dummy and am not seeing these things)
Some of the editing interface is a bit confusing (which is something of a burn, when you consider how cluttered and messy WordPress’s editor is)
This means none of the following sites I’ve tried have really hit everything I want:
Pika
Bear
Scribbles
Posthaven
Blogstatic
Write As
Possibly others I’m forgetting
All of the above are perfectly fine (or even great) for posting text, but I also want to post photos and drawings, so image management is important, and they all fall short in some way when it comes to that. I am sad.
I still have a Ghost trial to experiment with (kinda pricey), and there are other sites I’ve probably overlooked. Doing searches for WordPress replacements yields a lot of stuff designed for SEO/commercial interests, not just little sites for hipster bloggers not looking to be a content farm.
I will report back with more on this hopeless quest soon™.
In the meantime, here is a cat blogging furiously.
I decided to give Posthaven a shot. You can view my extensive archive of (as of this writing) one post here: https://stanwjames.posthaven.com/
As a WordPress alternative, it strips blogging down to its basics. Is this good? Is this bad? Let’s make a list (or two)!
The Good
It’s very easy to use. I was able to jump in and have things set up in a few minutes.
It’s affordable! At $5 U.S. per month, it gives you up to 10 blogs (!) and as far as I can tell, you can only pay $5 per month, which means no year-long commitments. Want out after the first $5? Easy-peasy!
It has a few nice themes to get you started.
Editing posts is simple.
Adding images is easy, and it automatically lets you click to expand on them. Other embeds (YouTube, etc.) are also straightforward.
People can easily upvote, comment or subscribe to your blogs.
An RSS feed is available.
The Not So Good
A large part of the ease of use is found through its limited options. You get some basic formatting options, and that’s about it.
It only has five themes. If you want to create new ones, you can, but have to dive into HTML and CSS.
It has no spelling checker, and LanguageTool does not seem to work in its text editor. This led me to editing my one post about seven times as I kept finding typos. I make a lot of typos.
Images are not displayed in any kind of WYSIWYG way and they are sized based on the theme.
Its feature request page only has two features as “planned”: more themes and markdown support.
The site describes itself as a work in progress, so I don’t ding it too much for being a bit barebones. The UI is simple, but very easy to use, and it’s one of the few blogging platforms I’ve been able to jump into and get posts out of that both look good and are easy to write/edit.
Still, I’m not ready to go all-in. I must continue to experiment before leaving WordPress behind.
This is kind of handy, because while I’m not convinced Write.as is the post-WordPress solution for me, it does remove the time pressure in tinkering around with it.
Do you want to join in the new retro fad of blogging like it’s 1999? I have an important tip to make the experience better for you and your readers, be they actual people, bots, AI or perhaps hyper-intelligent farm animals.
That tip is:
Never remote-link to images
I made it big because it’s important. You see, back in the olden times of badly-compressed JPGs and animated GIFs that were the size of postage stamps, there was this unspoken assumption that the internet (or more specifically, the World Wide Web1LanguageTool is insisting I capitalize this and I’m not in the mood to argue part of it) was forever. If something made it to the net, it stayed there. Everyone had a site or a blog or a page under construction, and it was messy and great.
Then the big companies moved in and basically paved over all of that. The do-it-yourself sites like GeoCities, Angelfire and others went away. Blogrolls turned into quaint relics. Algorithms and feeds took their place. And really, it seems a lot of people are happy today to just scroll through slop content made by machines others.
But the lesson for you, the brave new blogger, is this: Despite the Internet Archive (bafflingly the victim of an attack as I type this), and other efforts to preserve the web days of yore, there’s a decent chance that the witty image you link to in a blog post will be gone in seven years. Or maybe even next week. It could get deleted by the host, or moved. Maybe the site it’s hosted on vanishes into the ether. The point is, when you remote-link to an image, you are gambling that the image will stay put. And I am here to tell you it will not.
See the image above? I found it doing a search for “super smart Waddles”. But the copy you’re looking at is one I’m hosting myself. As long as I maintain my blog, the image will remain. The pig stays, because I brought the pig home.
This will be a quick one, because it’s just me explaining why it’s been a while since I had an update. Mainly, I have been preoccupied with other more pressing matters and this has taken time away from my search. I’m also increasingly skeptical that any alternative will give me what I want, despite my issues with WordPress, which means I might just stay with WordPress. But we’ll see.
I’ll have a more detailed report in Part 5, in which I will have actually tested write.as, as promised earlier.
I am in a quandary. I thought that researching the supposed finalists would clarify things, but I feel I am no closer now to making a decision.
I looked at what I felt were the two best choices–write.as and blogtastic. They have many broad similarities, not the least of which is an apparent fear of capitalization (or love for e.e. cummings). blogtastic has an advantage in price–at least until April 1, 2024, when their pricing increases.
I was leaning toward blogtastic, partly due to that price advantage, but then I checked its showcase page. And…it’s not good. It’s filled with blogs that have clearly been abandoned, or only ever had a few posts. Only one has a post from 2024. All of them have slow-loading images that draw onto the screen like a JPEG on a Pentium in 1998. blogtastic also features testimonials elsewhere on their site. One writer spoke highly of blogtastic. I click on the link to his site–and it’s very fast! Images load instantly. It’s also running on Ghost. Hmm.
Meanwhile, write.as doesn’t show many examples at all. One is in Japanese, and it looks…OK? It’s hard to get a handle on how sites typically look. To be fair, Matt Baer, who created write.as, does have a link to his own personal blog, and it looks perfectly fine. write.as also lets you have three blogs for its price, which is a nice bonus. The editor is clean, but also very spartan. Maybe a little too spartan. blogtastic leans a little more heavily on what I’d call extra features, like footnotes and things. I love that kind of stuff.
After looking over both, I came away completely unsure on whether either would meet my needs.
Here’s a look at pricing, with Ghost thrown into the mix, as it and blogtastic will be pretty close after blogtastic’s price increase. All prices are per year.
Ghost: $108 ($9 per month)
write.as: $72 ($6 per month)
blogtastic: $49 ($4.08 per month). This changes to $99 if you purchase after April 1st ($8.25 per month)
All three let you do a limited-time trial, so you can test drive each. Since I have no idea how any of these will actually feel in practice, I’m going to do that next.
In Part 2, I offer some takes on platforms I skipped, summarize my experiences with ones I’ve tested, and offer some alternatives to blogging altogether.
Not for me, but still good
Here are a few sites I skipped because they focus on text over images, though some do support images.
Scribbles. This one is still in early access, but the editor is very nice. There are no real themes to speak of, but the whole thing is well-designed and fast. If you just want text, this is a very good choice.
Bear (not to be confused with the note-taking app). Comes with some themes, supports markdown and images (as a paid option), but is extremely minimalist. It’s free for basic features and $5 per month/$48 per year for paid (paid covers things that are server-intensive).
omg.lol. This is a weird grab bag of stuff for a mere $20 per year. They now include a blog option which is currently in beta, uses markdown, and is the most “to the metal” of the three listed here.
Sites I’ve tried so far
Scribbles: If the image support was a little more refined, I might stick with it. I don’t knock it for this, though, it’s not their focus.
Bear: Fast and light, but again, image support is not quite there for my needs.
Pika: This was on my short list from Part 1 and…it’s so close. Images are constrained to the theme, so you have to right-click and “open image in new tab” to see them full-size. I can understand why it’s set up this way, but it’s just not right for me.
Alternate solutions to blogging platforms
Some of these may seem pretty obvious, I include them, anyway.
A journaling or diary app.
Pros: Completely offline, entries could be entire books if you are very silly and wordy
Cons: It’s for you and you alone, unless you publish your collected writings at a later date. This is also a pro to some people.
A paper journal. The pros and cons are the same as the electronic version, with the bonus of never needing electricity or battery power to write, just enough natural light and your favourite pen/pencil/crayon.
A note-taking app like Obsidian, Bear or one of the other billion options.
Pros: Lightweight, local, fast.
Cons: That sharing thing again. But wait! See the next bullet item…
A writing app that also lets you publish to the web. Some of these include Ulysses, Mars Edit and iA Writer (the Mac in particular has a lot of options).
Pros: An excellent writing environment, and they allow you to share your posts relatively easily.
Cons: You still need a site to share to. Also, while the writing experience is often quite nice, once you move beyond that with photos and heavier formatting, the process tends to start breaking down a bit.
Dictating into a voice-recording app or voice recorder device.
Pro: It’s as easy as just opening your mouth and talking.
Cons: Cleaning up the dictation later could prove clunky or messy. You have to decide where to put the transcripts, unless you just want an audio version of your life (which might be interesting!)
For Part 3, I will be doing more research and narrowing down my choices a bit more.
Here is another cat GIF. The cat is industriously working away on its blog, All the Mews Fit to Print.
Keep using WordPress and just shut up about it. It works, right?
Actually switch to a WordPress alternative.
Stop blogging altogether.
Post my cat pictures on Facebook for free (after getting a cat).
I have narrowed down these options to one (and a half):
Actually switch to a WordPress alternative.
Move some of my bloggy stuff to an offline journal (probably the running/exercise posts)
The next question is: Which WordPress alternative? Because it turns out there are a lot of options. Like, a lot. Oodles. Too many.
But since my needs are specific and known, I can winnow down the list. If your needs are like mine, this might be useful for you, too. If not, there is an animated GIF of a cat at the end of this post.
What I want
My needs (also in the linked post above, but paraphrased here):
Blog posts, both long and short.
Photos, along with galleries to keep them organized.
A general means of blog organization, like categories or tags.
An easy-to-use editor that makes me feel warm and fuzzy and want to share with the world.
Pretty basic stuff, really. If I eliminated photos (I will not do this, but let’s pretend), my choices would be nigh-infinite. I could go for one of many super-minimalist blogging sites. But having no photos would also mean no drawings, which are like photos I put together with my hands and brain instead of a camera. This is a dealbreaker. I don’t want to revive my old Flickr account.
That clears out the wide array of minimalist, text-only sites. What’s left? Still oodles!
What I’ve found
Important note: I am omitting blogs that lean into more technical, nerdy skills to set up or maintain, so there's nothing here that installs from a command line or runs from a folder or requires scripting, etc. These follow the flow of:
Write a post Click a button Your thoughts are on the internet
And a quick summary of them, with some emphasis on what I’m looking for:
Ghost
This is probably the most WordPress-like, and it takes the most direct aim at WordPress and its features, claiming to be better/faster and, in some cases, cheaper.
The biggest con is that it’s $9 U.S. per month minimum1All prices listed here are in U.S. dollars. This is a lot of money to record my inane thoughts that could just as easily be typed into Notepad for free. You can also self-host Ghost, which is cheaper, but not exactly a simple process.
Ghost does have another notable pro, though–it can import from WordPress, so the nearly 4,000 inane posts I’ve made here could be carried over.
Micro.blog
This is reasonably priced at $5 a month, but has an emphasis on community (not a bad thing if you’re looking for that) and while longer pieces are possible, the focus is more on short, quick posts.
write.as
There’s a free plan, with some reasonable limits, so you can try before you buy (note: as of this post, the free plan is listed as “Closed for now”), and it’s $6 per month after if you pay annually. It supports not just photos, but albums. It has a blog community and supports newsletters, which suggests it has started moving away from its personal blog roots.
Pika
Pika has a free plan that is essentially a trial–you can make 50 posts, and then you’re done. So if you only ever have 50 things to say, you don’t have to pay! It’s otherwise $6 a month. It emphasizes a great writing experience, has some simple themes, and supports images. It’s also really new, as it just launched at the end of January 2024.
Blogtastic
With a name like Blogtastic, you would expect this to be a good blogging platform. It has multiple plans, including Starter for $20 and Expert for $50. Prices are going up on April 1st, though (no foolin’), with new names like Hobby for $50 and Startup for $100. I don’t think the old $20 and new $50 plans match up, though their chart doesn’t make it especially clear.
Anyway, this platform seems to offer everything and has been running for about three years, so it’s still relatively new. It feels like a Ghost competitor and, indeed, they compare themselves directly to Ghost, stating that they are more focused on writing and less on “secondary” things. They claim their gallery management is “robust”!
Posthaven
There’s a $5 per month Founder Plan (good for 10 blogs) and–that’s it! No other options. It keeps things simple. Posthaven bills itself, somewhat weirdly, as “the blogging platform designed to outlive us.” I mean, OK, but I’m not sure if I care much about my blog a hundred years after I’ve departed the Earth for parts unknown.
A major caveat for me is image sizes seem to be limited due to their theming. They mention 800 pixels max, which is tiny and probably a dealbreaker.
Having gone through these, the ones I feel can be eliminated are:
Ghost (too expensive)
Micro.blog (cheap, but a different emphasis than what I’m looking for)
Posthaven (great, until you get to the tiny images)
This leaves Pika, write.as and Blogtastic. Currently, only one offers a free trial of sorts, so I’ll give Pika a test-run and do more research on write.as and Blogtastic.
Coming up in Part 2:
Some alternatives I rejected, but are still pretty good
The piece linked below is a very long, exhaustive blog report on why a certain pedestrian bridge exists on I-494 in Minnesota. That might not sound like a subject worthy of a lengthy investigation, but author Tyler Vigen goes on a nerdy, obsessive hunt to figure out why a pedestrian bridge that doesn’t seem to really connect to anything came to be.
Stick around till the end. It’s not exactly a twist, but it is satisfying. This is why blogs are still such a great resource.
I came across ooh.directory, which is a site that aggregates blogs (1,966 as of this post). It’s a pleasant and consuming way to find writing focused on a particular subject or theme that isn’t beholden to algorithms and all that.
Also, I love the bizarre, bold combination of colours it uses: dark green, orange and light purple. And light pink, I think, for text, which somehow works with everything else.
I wanted to highlight two blogs of PIKOTI (People I Know On The Internet). I made acquaintances with both of them through the Quarter to Three forums and like me, they both cherish the romantic dream of writing and getting paid fat piles of cash for doing so.
Matt Bowyer’s blog is nascent, with a mere four posts to date. It’s called Loading Screen and as Matt puts it:
I started this site for two reasons. 1) MattWBowyer.com was available, and since that’s me, I thought I should do something about it. 2) I’m writing a book. Actually, I wrote a book, or at least I wrote a first draft. It’s not too good, but I think it will end up being good.
I shall tease him unto the end of days if he doesn’t stick with his promise to post three times a week. This will be done to help him build character, lots and lots of character.
The other blog dates back from when FrontPage was considered hip. Actually, it was never considered hip, but Jason Pace’s blog was nonetheless started back in 1998, when Duke Nukem Forever had only been in development for a single year. His blog is called Aim for the Head. Quoth Jason:
This weblog itself is just where I ramble about the things I feel like rambling about. There is a smattering of armchair game design. I review every book that I read. I put forth the effort to track down passes for free movie screening and I review them too. I occasionally writing creative things and post them. And sometimes, like this About page, I just ramble.
Looks like Jason may need an editor. I’m available and cheap. And easy.
Jason doesn’t mention it in his About section but he also does this word of the day thing. On Broken Forum he describes it thusly: “I am also now doing a drawing each day based on either the reference.com or webster’s word of the day (I cheat and choose the better word, and also because some days one will have a word that doesn’t lend itself to drawing).” You can see one of the results in this post. This is exactly the sort of neat idea I love to steal borrow.
These are both a couple of super-friendly and helpful guys. Read their words and when the time comes, buy them!