Hello, Ghost
Gone are the days of WordPress with Elementor and countless plugins promising a user friendly way of achieving your vision. Every plugin added countless overhead to what I was actually trying to achieve. This introduced a rabbit hole of dependencies and security vulnerabilities and overpriced subscriptions at every step of the way.
I've tried blogging multiple times, and WordPress just wasn't it. It was bloated, slow and overwhelming with countless ways to write and organize your content. Social media blogging isn't it. I want to own my content. I didn't want to write a post just to get it taken down later... I wanted it on my own premises.
I've tried to write my own blogging solution from scratch multiple times, with every feature that I deemed necessary. I ended up writing so much code that I burned out within a week each time and developed an ick to this whole expressing myself on the internet thing.
I've also tried the "dev friendly" solutions with Hugo or Astro using themes for blogging. It was nice, but I wanted more. An editor that would just work, from anywhere. Can't forget that writing a blog post inside of my IDE felt like coding. I wanted it to feel like blogging, writing something meaningful for someone else to read.
Creating anything with WordPress in 2026 is not an option, you're better off adding setTimeout(3000) to your page load just to get the premium but authentic feel of WordPress. Between the horrors of last century PHP style monoliths and the bleeding edge modern frameworks, My next target on my list was Ghost.
Ghost is marketed as an all-in-one & one-click solution for pay walling your posts, putting that marketing fluff aside, it's open-source and self-hostable, which fills my core needs. The UI is clean, forget about WordPress style mess with elements written in the last century sprinkled over with a few subscription buttons because why not. This takes Ghost's UX to the next-level. I didn't have to go through countless themes or plugins to get to a state that I felt comfortable publishing with. Google will see my posts without going trough SEO hoops and a few more subscriptions, because keywords are somehow an expensive commodity over in the walled gardens.
Currently I'm happy with this setup. I've opted-out of the marketing fuzz that Ghost offers leaving me with a nice place for me to express myself and share my thoughts, without my IDE taunting me if my repo is synced or if I have to pay yet another month for a plugin I have to use because it's not baked in from the start.
