Early thoughts on Ghost.io

I’m in the process of switching over to Ghost.io for my blogging platform. And so far it seems to be a fit.

I’ve had a journaling habit for years (going back to 2010 when I went back to Expedia after my dad passed). but that has all been just private journaling. Starting out with a plain text file named after the date of the post. in 2014, I switched over to using DayOne as my journaling platform, now I could easily add a picture to each post! I thought it would be cool to print these journal entries as books, and I have about 6 inches of book shelf worth of printed journal entries, but it quickly dawned on my that that would not be that interesting.

Late in 2019 I discovered Obsidian and created a whole note taking ecosystem based on it, which included my “Daily note”, and i have been using that quite effectively for my daily journalling.

In 2021 I left Amazon, and went on six week road trip, and would send daily trip reports top my mom, aunts, uncles, sisters, friends etc by posting to - https://weatiesroadtrip2021.com and then mailing the webpage that was that post. This was done as a Wordpress site, and I have to say, that I wasn’t really all that impressed with the workflow, or the system frankly, so I didn’t keep that going.

In 2024, Catherine and I did a road trip in our sprinter van to Texas to see the Eclipse. For that I wanted to continue the process of sending out A daily trip report of where we had been, what we had seen, etc. It was good for the friends and family to keep up, but it was also a way for me to capture my memories, and preserve them to be revisited in the future.

So I created something of a cobbled together system using obsidian, git and Jekyl and it worked well enough, but it definitely had some rough edges. But not so rough to encourage me to move away from it. One thing that this system lacks is RSS feeds, and I had taken a couple of stabs at adding an RSS feeds, but all of the approaches I took seemed way to fragile and Janky, so I never implemented any of them.

Well, now that I am retired, I decided that I would take another stab at my blogging platform, so I put it into the back of my mind to pay attention to the different platforms that are out there, and figure out which ones might fit my needs. Among the many that are out there was ghost.io. I’m still early in this journey, and it is not driven from Obsidian, but everything else about it really pleases me. I like the way that I can publish to either a mailing list, to a blog post, or to both just as easily. People will be able to subscribe to RSS feeds for any tag they are interested in. They can sign up for the mailing list on their own, or just as importantly unsubscribe without having to engage me at all. So all of this seems just fine.

I’ve started to copy and paste the content from my old blog over to this in the background, and I will continue to use this to post my weekly(ish) update to mom.