2025 blog migration to ghost
I migrate old blog posts to ghost.org and review the experience.
A reply to a mastodon post prompted me to look back to blogging.
I've been doing a lot of reflection recently. I've never considered myself a good writer. My spouse Carrie writes and communicates well and quickly. It's her jam.
By contrast, everything I write takes ages, and comes out poorly at first. It gets better with revision. It's always been like this for me.
So I dusted off the old www.purins.com blog, and took a look through it. I had hidden every blog post that had never been revised, or might make me look weird in the eyes of a new employer. Reducing my visible internet footprint was safer for myself anyways, I told myself.
But they're all in here as drafts. Maybe some of them will get revised.
Experience
The experience has been super smooth. It's been less that 3 hours poking around, but I was able to do the basics in under an hour.
- Make a new ghost.org account and put in my credit card for billing
- Export/import of old posts, guided by ghost prompts
- Redirect the domain DNS
- Setup a stripe account and hook it up to take payments
Editing
And with that, I had 4 or 5 public posts that needed revising. I see that posts don't age well when you assume it's the year of publication without stating the year. Some links go dead. Each post looks dumb without a header image. Header images from Unsplash don't come with alt text provided.
Content lengths that made sense for MoveableType and then Wordpress don't make sense for the current layout in Ghost.
The tags experience is interesting. There are public tags (start with alphanumeric characters) and private tags (start with the # symbol). The first tag in the list is a primary tag. The ghost Ruby template didn't know how to present the first public tag, so if a private tag was first, the post didn't show up in a tag collection (also published to a subpath, and called a 'slug').
Future improvements
I selected the Ruby layout template because I think it'll be good for highlighting art pieces for purchase. I might look at setting up how-to posts, or paywalling posts that go into my process.
That means I'm going to set this up as a store or newsletter. I have time to figure that out.
Things will shift around a bit, between the long form writing and the store-ing and learning how this integrates with Mastodon and PixelFed.
I don't have to have it all figured out to get started though! Incremental progress for today is enough for now.
Take care,
-e
