Keith Wagner

Making a Switch to Ghost?

Several months ago, when Ghost was first released to the public, I took a look at it and made a note to give it a look-see. Over the past week, I finally got it running on my dev server playing nicely with my Apache setup. So far I've been playing around with it and am contemplating whether I want to switch my blog platform over to it from WordPress, which is what I currently use.

I've been blogging off and on since 2007. My first blog was actually a custom blog that I first built to help myself learn PHP. Since then, I've generally used WordPress with various different looks. WordPress has worked well for me. I've gotten a decent understanding of how it works so I can build themes for it and maintain it properly. I can post from my phone and my tablet with ease through the WordPress app. Simply put, WordPress just works.

So why should I even contemplate a switch? Truth be told, I still can't come up with a great answer for this. I see other people raving about it and its simplicity for simply writing does have a certain draw to it. One of the reasons for this blog was to get me into the habit of writing and Ghost seems to do a great job at doing just that. It doesn't yet seem to have the same support that WordPress has for plugins and whatnot, though that's apparently in the works. Still though, I don't really use any plugins for my blog at all except for Disqus so it probably isn't all that big of a deal.

I guess one of the biggest drawbacks (for me) I see for it is that it's written in node.js. I have no problem with node.js, its just that I haven't really played around with it much and would like a better understanding of it before I'm willing to run my site on it. That in itself wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that I'm busy enough the way it is. Now I feel like I'm just complaining about nothing or maybe I just have too much on my plate at the moment.

Either way, it's something I am still considering, but I can't help but to thinkā€¦if it ain't broke, don't fix it.