Ghost is... fine?

I set up this blog about 14 months ago; I wanted to write something, anything, once a day for the month of November 2023, and put it in a public place. That didn't last long – establishing habits is hard! – but it got me used to working with Ghost, the blogging software that powers this site.

Ghost seems designed to compete with Medium, Substack, and Patreon, which is most evident in its insistence that I shouldn't consider you all readers, I should consider you members, and my focus should be on getting more members. Which... isn't really what I'm looking for right now. (It might be in the future. I have to see how my venture into reopening my Patreon goes.) I just want a place to put down my thoughts that isn't a microblogging service, and let whoever wants to read them.

And in that respect, Ghost is fine. It's got a rich text editor, which – look, I'm clearly in the minority on this, but I'd really rather have a code editor that supports limited markup and lets me have fine control over what you see^[1]. That said, Ghost's RTE works out of the box and it's ... fine^[2]. Its management of previous posts leaves something to be desired, at least in my eyes; there's a lot of "well, I know what I meant" in the design language, and if you change a post slug after a post is published, there's no automatic redirection for the old slug; it just goes away, which can be confusing because Ghost saves the post slug the first time your post is autosaved and then doesn't auto-update it if you change the title, which means that if you don't write the title of a post first, your post slug is going to be untitled - or untitled-17, depending on how many times you've made this mistake.

Anyway, if you want to move away from Substack, Patreon, or Medium to a self-hosted option, Ghost will probably work as you expect and do what you want it to. For me, though, Ghost is the first blogging software I've used where every time I use it, I'm thinking about what I could use to replace it.