Welcome

After a couple of "hello world" posts, this is the first proper post on my new blog.

I'm trialling a self-hosted Ghost blog and site. A few bugs aside (which I'm sure will be squashed in future updates), I've been impressed with it so far.

Up until now, I've tended to write really long posts on my GoToSocial account, and have treated that as a de-facto blog. For reasons that should be obvious, having longer-form articles on a social platform that's primarily designed as a Twitter replacement is not ideal.

My hope is to move many of those longer-form original posts to my blog, and use GoToSocial and BlueSky for shorter-form posts.

What I like about Ghost is that it's basically an open source Substack replacement, which also integrates with Mastodon (through the Fediverse) and BkueSky (using BridgyFed).

What that means is that blog posts, like this one, are visible on the Fediverse, You can also do shorter form posts, which are called "notes", as well as view and reply to comments.

It's not quite as feature-filled as GoToSocial for running a single-user instance, but then again it doesn't need to be either!

Beyond that, Ghost integrates a number of features from Substack, including the ability to post static pages, use different themes, have paywalled articles, offer subscriptions, and a bunch of other features you'd want in a content management system designed for publishing content.

In the immediate short term, I'm keen to explore the Ghost platform further. And then hopefully in the future, it will be filled with articles about tech, cities, transport, Australian history, and other topics.