It was time for a change. Mostly because I have a different project where I wanted to get a blog up and running quickly.

it was between ghost and gutenberg and hugo

It’s been bloody ages since I’ve updated hayley.io, so one of the obvious choices was just to pick back up again and use ghost.

the problems with ghost

For me, cost is quite possibly the biggest barrier.

If it were ONE ghost install, and only needed that one VPS, okay. $5/month isn’t going to break the bank. But I like the idea of being able to run multiple writing sites that may have zero to do with one another, so it wouldn’t make much sense for them to all be hosted on one blog.

Second to that, is just it just feels oh so very wrong, that one of my least traffic’d sites has an entire VPN to itself. Granted, I could move more things on to it, but that puts those other projects at risk if the Ghost install gets hacked. And on that note…

Security. When I take a month (or waaay more) off from writing, I’m not logging into the Ghost admin and checking for upgrades. Yeah, I could avoid this problem by doing a ghost pro account, but that’s a ridiculous $29/month for a single blog (I’m clearly not their target market).

For added hilarity, when I did go to upgrade the site most recently (after a hiatus), it failed and took the site down with it. Granted, the instructions included what to do next and I was able to get it back up and running fairly quickly, but still. It wasn’t a good sign for someone who was trying to decide whether or not to continue using Ghost.

going static - gutenberg vs hugo

I was looking into Gutenberg because I might end up learning Rust soon™ and it looked to be a well designed static site builder.

Honestly though, the momentum behind Hugo and the amount of themes it has is what steered me towards it. It just appears to have a better out of the box experience, and I’m at the stage where I’m just looking for a good static site builder that I don’t have to spend much time customizing. Also, though I didn’t look under the hood of Gutenberg at all, I don’t know Rust at all at the moment… which kind of would be a barrier to trying to customize things, I’d assume.

back to static

So this site is back to static. Honestly, I can’t say whether Hugo will be what I’d say I’m FAR more likely to switch to a different static generator than go back to Ghost at this point.

I’m currently using the ghostwriter theme which is funny to me, since it was one of the themes I used WAY back in the day for a Ghost site that no longer exists. I’m not super happy with some of the decisions it’s made (like random stuff like the title bar being a combination of the article name and the author name instead of the site’s name) but we’ll see if I end up customizing it or finding something else. There’s also all of the featured post images that I had on my ghost site, that I’d like to bring back. I’m not sure this theme supports that.

For now, I’m content enough with what I’ve got. And for “fun”, I’ve resurrected the posts from the first gatsby-based version of this site.

I’m getting a feeling that an unhealthy amount of my posts are along the lines of “it’s time for a change”…