While trying to get going on a new blog post, I found myself frustrated with GitHub Pages' Jekyll sandbox.
My previous site theme was hand-rolled (I bet you'd never guess!) from a Material Design Lite template. Admittedly, this was hubris. I am ignorant about "responsive" design (does that actually mean anything?), PWAs, accessibility, et cetera.
Leveraging Jekyll plugins would ultimately mean more overhead to publish my site, because I could not rely on GitHub to generate it for me. So I threw in the proverbial towel, and decided to look at other blog software.
Blog Software Requirements
- Has some sort of GUI.
- Easy on the wallet.
- Not WordPress.
I hate the word "blog".
I Picked Ghost
I decided to self-host using Ghost for now. What I like about Ghost:
- It's easy to get up & running with a self-hosted instance.
- Admin interface(s). While I generally enjoy puttering around in my terminal and editor, this is not one of those times. I just want to write.
- Ghost is implemented in Node.js, so I can hack on it if I need to.
- I could import my post (sic) from Jekyll pretty easily using nodejs-jekyll-to-ghost.
- Not WordPress.
Finally, Since I have no design sense to speak of, I threw down for some themes by Malvouz, and tweaked one of them to be more boneskullish.
That's my story.