Welcome to my new blog!
As you may have noticed, my new blog is no longer running Wordpress.
Why?
I've stuck by Wordpress for many years and it's not a bad piece of software, from a usability perspective. It also has a plugin for just about anything you can possibly think of, which makes extending it easy, usually. But, over the years, when I've encountered an issue or required some functionality that has forced me to delve into the code, it quickly becomes a painful experience. I could spend a long time going into detail on this subject, but I'm certain this topic has already been covered many times before, such as here. Also, it's kinda slow, even on SSD based cloud servers that every other PHP site I host just files on.
So, why Ghost?
I read a lot of blogs, especially related to technology and programming. I've seen an increasing number of sites using Ghost and I really like the clean, simple and modern look of the UI. The default theme alone looks great and is in another league to Wordpress' odd, left aligned, fits some screens but not others, 2014 theme. The selection of 3rd party themes is also fantastic. It's incredibly easy to use, with a simple admin interface and markdown is a pleasure to use over some of the alternatives. It doesn't come without it's own complications, such as integrating into our existing PHP stack, which I'll discuss in a future post.