I wrote about Picking Ghost a year ago, but I’m now going back to a static site generator. For personal writing, I previously published a few posts on another domain back in 2013. I used Hugo back then, but much of it was poorly done (and I wasn’t able to regenerate that site since ~2015, so it just languished). Last year I tried Wordpress and Ghost, but went with Ghost. And now in 2022, I’m back to Hugo. ...
Ghost subtly told me I am holding it wrong. As I’ve been writing posts with Ghost, I have seen that it will do odd things with paragraph layout if I put two spaces after a period. This aligns with Microsoft Word and most of the publishing industry, which says you should only have one space after a period. Per Wikipedia: The desired or correct sentence spacing is often debated but some sources now claim an additional space is not necessary. ...
One of the eternal questions for someone starting a blog is what platform to use. Let’s go through that thought process. Self Hosted or Not Hosting on a third-party platform would get me up and writing faster, but as someone who has previously run my own Wordpress instance, I like self hosting. My 3 main reasons: I enjoy the tinkering. Playing with Linux systems to get them working efficiently helps me to learn. While much of the detailed knowledge hasn’t applied directly to my day-to-day job, many of the general concepts I learned along the way have been applicable. Customization. While I don’t intend to do a lot of theme customization, being able to do whatever I want to the system is always a nice option. The free hosting of WordPress, Medium, Substack, and others have more limited customization options. Cost. Ghost hosted is more expensive than the bottom end Linode or DigitalOcean instance ($9 vs $5 /month). Medium and Substack are free, but very much limit your customization. I knew I was likely going to self host from the start, but realizing how much those other platforms limited post styling made it a simple choice. ...