My blog is currently running on Ghost 1.0 I’m blogging for almost 20 years, started with blogger.com I think, eventually migrated to self-hosted Ghost when it was pretty new and lightweight. I can host anything that runs on Linux, I can even use Docker.
I don’t want to migrate to the latest Ghost version because it feels very enterprisey now, needs a lot of resources on the server and uses a complex data format instead of Markdown. I don’t need monetization either.
My requirements are:
- possible to migrate ~30-40 Markdown posts + embedded images from Ghost 1.0
- future proof, i.e. simple data format so I don’t get locked in
- low RAM/CPU usage
- easy maintenance, creating posts, backups, etc
- RSS support
I’ll be very grateful for any suggestions.
Depending on exactly what features you actually need in term of things like commenting, you might want to look into a static site generator. Something like hugo woud probably do what you need in terms of translating the markdown into a blog. It has the advantage that you can them host the pages on a normal web server, rather than running a blogging platform, giving you a much lighter weight server footprint, and a much smaller attack surface too.
I don’t really need comments, only RSS. Hugo is a great piece of software, I actually use it for my personal webpage. It would be an option for the blog too, my only gripe is that it adds some friction. For example if I want to embed images, I have to upload them somewhere, and manually insert the filename. I also need regenerate the site if I add new posts. I know this can be automated using scripts.
With Ghost it’s very simple, I can just write a post, upload the images, hit “Publish” and done. There was even a mobile app for writing new posts, but it doesn’t work anymore.
I host my hugo site through gitlab pages (any forge “pages” could work) and images are simple. I just drop the image from my file browser into my IDE (VSCodium) in-line and it automatically puts the image in the article’s folder and links to the image in the article. I push the article to gitlab and the site is automatically rebuilt with the new content.
Some hugo themes might have custom shortcodes to display images in certain ways like side by side, galleries, etc with special styling. Invoking those shortcodes is different but just a simple image upload is no trouble. And no scripts necessary
Hugo can handle images through its asset pipelines, so you should be able to just store them with your markdown. I agree it’s a little more friction than a blogging pkatform, but it does mean that you can just write your posts in your editor of choice and publish them with just a command, or if you’re feeling fancy, set up git to trigger publishing when you push.
Hugo is really easy to automate too. Just toss it on a github/codeberg repo and use one of the community’s publish pipelines.