So far so Ghost

Mitch Jackson -

Wow my personal website needs some love. No new posts in years. Can't even find the markdown sources used to generate the website anymore. I'd like to recommend a few projects I'm involved in move from Wordpress or Confluence to Ghost. But can I really make that recommendation? So here I am, dogfooding to find out.

Why is Ghost interesting?

  • Beautiful post editing environment
  • Open sourceish and relatively standardized
  • Integrated e-mail lists
  • Lightweight
  • Well put together docker container
  • Straightforward theming engine

The journey so far

This website lives on a docker host in my office closet. The theme is the official Journal theme, slightly modified. Because the official theme has a public github repo, the modifications can easily be rebased onto future theme updates to keep current. Deployment is based on the official ghost docker container, with a Dockerfile that injects the customized theme. So in theory, the custom theme can easily follow the official docker container updates with a little automation.

Wishlist going forward

  • A few more custom page layouts
  • Gated sections dedicated to project-based posts
  • Hands-off automation to deploy new custom container builds as the official container is updated
  • Do some writing!