Choosing a blogging platform

I really really want to start blogging.

I tried Wordpress.

I tried Tumblr.

I wanted to try Medium but was intimidated by the caliber of writing on the site. I don’t only want to write about philosophical issues or trends in technology or how my breakfast is a metaphor for humanity. I want to be able to write silly, simple things as well.

I thought I would like Wordpress, but it was a bit overwhelming for a simple blog. Especially because I didn’t want my whole site to have to use Wordpress. And I’d get an insane amount of spam comments. Way obnoxious.

I’ve been using Tumblr for my current choice, which can be viewed at alexsg.me. I actually recieved that domain name for free when I purchased hosting at A Small Orange (ASO) last year and since I had already purchased alexandragreenspan.com I decided to use alexsg.me for a blog. If I end up switching completely to Ghost then perhaps I’ll use alexsg.me as a freelance/design type of website. Or I’ll let it expire, who knows?

##Ghost Anyway, I found Ghost quite serendipitously. I was looking at the ASO forums this morning, not for any reason, and came across two posts referencing Ghost. Intrigued, I looked it up further, and found that ASO was one of the first webhosts to actually offer an easy installation through Softaculous! Very forward-thinking, ASO!

(Sidenote: ASO is actually my first ever real webhost. I’ve been making sites for 10+ years and have been extremely picky when it comes to web hosting, looking over reviews for tons of hosts out there before I was finally satisfied.)

Ghost in its form today actually emerged with glory from a Kickstarter campaign. Its aim is to make blogging simpler, focus back on the blog (instead of CMS), and allow for easy posting using Markdown. Markdown is great because you can type with different symbols (such two asterisks in front of and behind text to bold it). I’d heard of many people using Markdown through other blogging platforms, such as Jekyll, and I definitely wanted to try it.

It’s kind of exciting jumping onto this brand new platform, which already has a really smooth admin interface while only in version 0.4.1! I’m trying out a bunch of different free themes that are offered, as well as editing the layouts of them a bit, so don’t be surprised if this blog keeps changing while you are reading the posts.

If I have time I even hope to make a theme on my own! Feeling inspired. I gotta add it to my list of goals. I’d include the list here to test out the bullet feature of Markdown, but that’s not really relevant to this post.

More updates/reviews to come!