Switching to Ghost (or, a journey towards simplicity)

After taking my dog hiking earlier today, I had a bit of extra time on my hands. So, I started up my website again.

I've decided to take up some philosophy changes, though. You see, my old website was focused too much on the wrong things. I was spending way too much time mucking about in the CSS or trying to figure out how to center that new element I added to my home page that I had lost sight of what a personal website is for in the first place: to put one's content on the internet. Instead of writing blog posts, I was using that time to tweak my site, making it look better, adding this cool thing I found on someone else's site, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not discouraging this in any way. Making one's website look good and taking inspiration from others is an art form in and of itself. However, one needs a balance. There's no point in having a pretty website if there's nothing on it.

So, my new website is set up using Ghost. Compared to the messy Hugo and Eleventy sites of old, Ghost feels like a breath of fresh air. Everything is easily configurable in a GUI interface, and things I had previously torn my hair out over now just worked. The steps to write a post are so much simpler now, too. Instead of creating a new markdown file and copy-pasting over a metric ton of boilerplate, I can now just hit a button in my beautiful admin page and start writing. This ease of use is something I can already tell will encourage me to write more.

In addition to this new philosophy towards setting up a website comes a new philosophy about the writings I will be publishing in the future. I was too focused on post quality, thinking that my posts had to be some of my best writing work. Now, I'll focus more on just getting my thoughts out of my brain. Be prepared to see more shortform content, as well as responses to content I see elsewhere on the internet.