20260113_the-ghost-is-gone

At the end of 2022, I started this blog after freezing my old one. Back then I decided to use Ghost as a CMS.
I also wrote a blog post explaining my decision: Now It’s Kernic.

Three years later, my enthusiasm for Ghost CMS has mostly vanished. I still think it is a good CMS, but its focus doesn’t fit my needs. The newsletter feature sounds nice, but my type of blog isn’t made for newsletters. Also, the technical foundation may be modern, and even with Ghost being open source, it is aimed at providing hosted Ghost(Pro) services. For self-hosting, the system is unnecessarily complex.
Until now I haven’t been able to get the scheduling function working, and ActivityPub never worked.

So when I rented a new server on Black Friday with the goal of modernizing the systems, it was the perfect time to search for an alternative. The first alternative that came to mind was WordPress. With the change, I hoped to get two new features: ActivityPub and multiple languages. Both were possible with WordPress, and so I migrated my blog and pushed it live… for two days. Then I was so annoyed that I reactivated Ghost again and searched for a new plan.

You’re now seeing the result. There are a lot of changes behind the scenes, but also for users.

The most obvious one is the design. It’s simpler, no fancy features. Pure HTML, CSS, and a little JavaScript. But no external frameworks, fonts, or other resources. If there is no embedded content, your data isn’t sent anywhere. This is achieved with several other changes. The newsletter is gone. I had four subscribers and below a 50% open rate. Three comments in three years didn’t justify a comment system, so it’s gone too. This site is now prebuilt with Hugo, and the server just serves static files to you. Without any interactive elements, there is no need to store any information about you or in your browser. Cookies gone.

Some changes you might not notice immediately were implemented too. The main change certainly is that my blog is now multilingual. The main language is English, but every page and post is available in German too. On one hand, I increase my audience with this, but on the other hand, I want to improve my English. All previous blog posts are now available in English, not translated by me but by Kagi Translate.
Additionally, I extended the machine-generated audio versions of my blog posts. With Ghost I had to generate the audio version by hand and upload it manually to the post. As I automated the publishing of blog posts now with Hugo and some Python scripts, I also added the automatic generation of audio versions for the posts-in both languages. And when it was already automated, I had audio versions made for all previously published blog posts too. But what is a blog with audio? Right, a podcast. So now there is also a podcast feed in addition to the normal RSS feed. Feel free to listen to my blog posts, even inside your podcast app, instead of reading them.

That was it for now. Any feedback? Hit me on Mastodon.