Aren't We Back?!
And remember when I said I didn't like Ghost? Well. Turns out, I hated how WordPress kept being a PITA even more!
Hello! Hello! If you can see this, that means everything went off swimmingly. For the most part. As I moved away from ClassicPress (WordPress) and into this new thing, I did take some time to poke around and mess with things.
There was a learning curve, but wasn't as steep as I thought it would've been. Fo sar, a lot of it is because it's not how I'm used to doing things. Imagine: it took me until the year of your lord 2025 for me to finally stop double spacing after a sentence ending.
And remember when I said I didn't like Ghost? Well. Turns out, I hated how WordPress kept being a PITA even more!
Words. Eaten.
It's been a good experience, so far! But it wasn't without its hiccups.
OOPS, NO GALLERIES
Yeah... those neat galleries I had exist only in backups, now, and I have no idea how I'm going to recreate those in my new workflow. Worst case scenario I'll look into another service (there's a few I have bookmarked!), or if I'm really sitting on my thumbs I can always build it!
Some stuff is kinda fuuuucked
Imagine my horror when I imported my Pages and... the images are missing. And some of the blockquotes are messed up (how dare I use the CITE tag!?) I've yet to go waaaay back but those are probably a mess– but they are passable and fixable. This is what backups are for! So, uh, sorry. I'm going through things.
Quit with the verbiage
If you're poking around here and see anything about "paid members only," ignore that mess. My blog will never, ever be behind a paywall, and if there's a module asking for money I forgot to strip it out or disable it. I already have Ko-Fi, so I find it redundant to have a tipping/etc system in place here. My first go-round with Ghost was pretty off-putting because of this, but hey, it is there for those that need it. And it does look easy as pie!
"Do It Yourself, Punk."
I gotta pay an extra $5 to post to automatically post to Mastodon using two integrated apps!? Nah, we're going back to "oh shit oops that published two hours ago!" frantic toots on my tooter. Out of all the plugins I had installed, I'll probably miss this one the most.
"but why isn't this a carbon copy"
Look, I don't have time to create a custom Ghost theme from scratch and with my own little eccentricities (a sidebar is required always!), so I ended up doing what I do best: modifying the shit out of it.
I grabbed a basic theme that was "good enough" and started doing my CSS fuckery. Once it got through to my head that this isn't Wordpress and it doesn't need to look the same, I loosened up a little and changed things up a bit. I even had a little fun with some emojis here and there.
Doesn't look half-bad.
In the meantime, I've a copy on my main compy to study and tinker with. Because, as you can see, these are "posts," not "issues" (but issues, I got 'em, know what I mean? ;) ). And I can put in some custom fonts too.
Remind me to look for a super basic starter theme for Ghost so I can really play with it from the ground up. Well. Not exactly.
It's Their Problem Now
This time, I'm not self-hosting. For an extra $5 I get that peace of mind and I am okay with that. I ain't got the time (or patience). Seriously, Digital Ocean has some of the best support I have encountered, and they at least made it bearable and I did learn quite a lot. Like how I ain't got time for that shit. XD
There Will Be Blood, but only because I am clumsy with my tweaks and it's only a tiny bit
So things may look silly for awhile!
What Did I Learn, Tho?
If I stayed on WordPress, I would have switched to ButtonDown. They were easy to set up and easier to use– no futzing with SMTP, two different plugins, and any strangeness coming from that! And again, great customer service.
WriteFreely was another one I considered, but having to convert every WordPress post to Markdown made it a non-starter. If I only had 10, 20 posts? I can knock that out in a day, and probably by hand. Post count reaching 200? Naaaaah. And I will just go ahead and say either self-host or sign up here (paid). I just don't know any good communities to sign up under, and moving from paper.wf was Very Taxing (is it abandoned?)
But enough about that.
Now Let's Return to the Main Subject
I'm behind on my #NaPoWriMo posts. I've been stressed, and I've been trying to organize things. But now this is done I can rest a little and resume this.
Thank ya for sticking around! Here's to some new ruckusing!
