this blog of mine

Experimenting with Ghost. Spooky!

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.
  • 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.)
  • 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 changed my logo and realized why it looked familiar…

The new logo uses the same font but adds an underline and changes the colour from all-orange to green and yellow. Green and yellow work well together, but there was something a little too familiar. Then I realized it.

I had created the Subway logo.

So now I have to change it again.

My Subway-ish logo:

Fake edit: I’m going with this for now. At least it doesn’t make me crave a six-inch chicken sub.

Not a fake edit: Now I’m trying a yellow and gray version. I’ll probably keep changing it, but won’t update this post every time, so the true level of my madness will not be fully revealed.

Where will this site be in 2025?

Probably not on the moon. But never say never.

The WordPress 6.7 update got pushed out tonight, with a few new features. Normally I’d be interested, but since I’m actively trying to find a replacement for WP, not so much now.

Speaking of, I have one more major platform to try: Ghost. There will be others, but this is the main contender that’s still left.

Currently, Posthaven is looking decent, but not quite there (but maybe?) with Pika and Scribbles as lesser possibilities (I love Scribbles’ UI, but it focuses almost exclusively on text).

I’ll try to test Ghost soon™, but I have to admit I’m a little burnt out on all the options and fiddling and whatnot. I really hoped Blogstatic would be The One, but it wasn’t. They are making some changes soon, and I gave them feedback that they seemed to appreciate, so I may look at it again at some point. 

UPDATE, November 18, 2024: Blogstatic has rebranded to BlogMaker and eliminated all plans in favour of one that gives you unlimited blogs. Neat! But now, instead of paying $50 per year for a single blog, you pay $25 a month for as many as you want. So if you only want a single blog, this is now six times more expensive, or a 500% increase in price, if you prefer. This puts Blogstatic BlogMaker firmly in the HELL NO category.

In the meantime, I really want to post the cat typing GIF again, but I won’t. Instead, this:

I am not going to spam 14 posts tonight

14 posts is how many I’d need to post in the next four hours in order to get my desired monthly average of 2 posts per day.

I mean, I could cheat and do it pretty easily:

  • 14 one-line posts
  • 14 posts of cat pictures (so tempting)
  • 14 posts highlighting a “best of” post from this blog, based on my own arbitrary criteria
  • 14 letters from the alphabet
  • Breaking up “The 12 Days of Christmas” and adding two brand-new things, like cows a-mooing or crows a-cawing or whatever.
  • And so on.

But I am doing none of that.

Probably.

My nigh-hopeless search for a WordPress replacement continues

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.

Posthaven: Initial thoughts

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.
  • It has tags. I like tags. Maybe too much.
  • 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.

That whole WordPress drama, again

An update from my perspective, having blogged on WordPress for just under 20 years:

  • I turned off the WordPress news widget in my WordPress dashboard, because it is now filled with unhinged posts from the co-founder of WordPress.
  • I am still actively looking for a place to move to, away from WordPress. It’s now a question of where I’ll land, not if.
  • To that end, I realized I had been consistently mistaking the name of a possible new platform as Blogtastic, when it is, in fact, Blogstatic. I am smart.
  • I have backed up everything on this blog, including all one billion images, of which 990 million are cats.
  • When you have an entire website (not hosted by WordPress) devoted to every time you have “lied, misrepresented or behaved in a questionable manner”, you may not be charting the best course forward possible.

I expect to make a decision on a platform soon™.

An important blogging tip

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.

An example of a hyper-intelligent farm animal. Also, you should watch Gravity Falls.

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.

Blog smart, fellow writers!

WordPress alternatives: October 2024 update

Another excuse to post an old-timey typewriter photo. Photo by Min An.

Short: I still haven’t found one.

Longer: The ones I’ve tried so far don’t have the right level of flexibility and customization that I want.

There are a lot of blogging platforms out there and they all excel at letting you put words onto the internet.

But I want more than words. I am a visual person, so I like including photos, images and things. Some blogging sites focus only on words, some allows images with limits, but very few seem to just let you freely mix both with abandon.

I want abandon.

Ghost probably comes the closest, but it’s $9/month (US, so closer to $12 per month for me) and that’s the basic plan, which doesn’t even let you use custom themes.

There’s Blogtastic, which sounds good on paper, but there’s no way to try it out other than paying, and I have enough doubts about performance, etc. to hesitate.

Beyond that is the world of static site generators, but I don’t want to host, configure and deal with backend nonsense. I do enough of that now. I just want to post words and pictures, to do so at reasonable cost and in a way that lets me relatively easily export my work if I decide to pull up stakes.

Summary: I continue to ponder. I am feeling an urge to start some kind of more focused writing project, though. Maybe I should just write a short story. 😛

The angry screeds are coming from inside the blog

UPDATE, September 27, 2024: Fixed some details. Also, here is a longish piece by Josh Collinsworth that covers the whole sorry affair in detail. The only thing missing is Mullenweg's announcement to give WP Engine a four-day "reprieve", written in the same churlish tone as everything else he's put out recently. I would not invite this guy to your next birthday party.

It seems that a dispute has erupted between WordPress and WP Engine, a company that makes use of WordPress in ways that the WordPress founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg apparently does not like. There are cease and desist letters, lawyers and all that involved now.

This has led to a couple of unusual entries in the normally quiet WordPress Events and News section of my blog’s dashboard, as seen below.

Clicking the links (you can’t click them in the image, sorry!) will lead to the WP founder saying mean things about WP Engine, even calling it a “cancer.” He had threatened to bad mouth WP Engine at a major public WP event (ironically sponsored in part by WP Engine) if WP engine didn’t share some of their sweet lucre with him through some vaguely defined licensing something-or-other that Matt appeared to have invented very recently. WP Engine asked for more time, Matt took that as no and the bad-mouthing took place). It’s ugly all around.

And what this person–the CEO and founder of WordPress–has done has made people start to question the actions of WordPress as an organization, and how much it can be trusted moving forward. It takes a long time to build a good reputation, but only moments to ruin one.

I was already revisiting my (ever)quest to move my blogging, and this is…helping. I’m not sure if that’s the outcome Matt Mullenweg was looking for.