Blogging with Ghost

I recently¹ went on holiday—nice, I know. I wanted to share some images with my friends and family. For reasons apparent in this blog post, I would rather not use a tool like Polarsteps. But of course, a blog was perfect for this, as I was literally writing a blog.

To the keen observer, it might occur that this is also a blog—and in fact, those people are absolutely correct. This is a blog, but it has a slightly different focus. It leans more towards technical topics, less about my personal life, and not at all about my travels.

Perhaps most importantly, this blog is written in Hugo, which is absolutely spectacular and something I feel very comfortable with. However, when travelling, it has one significant disadvantage: it just about requires a laptop. Writing for this blog involves using a laptop, a code editor, and writing in Markdown—not exactly convenient on a phone. And frankly, I would rather not bring my laptop on holiday². So I went looking for a tool to fill that gap.

Finding a tool wasn’t actually that hard. Phone support was a must, and I wanted an open-source blogging platform. WordPress felt a bit too big and wasn’t really the direction I wanted to go. However, I’d read countless good things about Ghost. So, I decided to give it a try.

I didn’t feel like setting it up myself—although I believe that would have been relatively straightforward—so I opted for the fully managed Ghost(Pro) hosting. It’s always nice to have a solution where three clicks get you up and running. This also came with the added benefit of built-in email newsletters, so I encouraged people (mostly my parents) to subscribe. That way, my travel blog was delivered straight to their inboxes.

Ghost offers a very polished experience. It’s not overly fancy, but it provides a solid editor with excellent support for everything you need while blogging. It has good image handling, built-in scheduling, and it produces a clean and professional output. I really can’t complain. In theory, it’s possible to customise a lot of the theme, but I didn’t feel the need. I just used the default theme and focused on writing—that’s what blogging is all about, after all.

I wrote a blog post every day while travelling, and I think people enjoyed reading them. My friends and family were kept up to date with what I was doing, and it was an easy way to share some holiday impressions.

Originally, I planned to archive the blog for posterity at some point—by exporting the posts to Markdown and creating a Hugo template that mimics the style. However, I haven’t gotten around to that yet. Which, to be fair, is fine. I guess I’ll keep supporting the people behind Ghost for a bit longer. Their blogging platform is something I wholeheartedly recommend. It’s much easier than doing everything yourself with Hugo—though, in my opinion, it’s also a bit less nerdy and fun.