Why I ditched Wordpress for Ghost
It's no secret: I'm a self-hosting nerd. I manage over 40 different websites for my customers, my company, and myself. But that's not all. I also admin dozens of Docker containers and other hosted applications for both business and pleasure.
It's no secret: I'm a self-hosting nerd. I manage over 40 different websites for my customers, my company, and myself. But that's not all. I also admin dozens of Docker containers and other hosted applications for both business and pleasure.
I'm not shy about it, either. I love being able to quickly spin up a new service and learn all about it in real time.
This all started, for me, with Wordpress. Back in the day, Wordpress was the defacto standard. In many ways, it still is. It's the primary Content Management System for the web, being the underpinnings of an estimated 40-something percent of today's websites. I've been using Wordpress for decades (yes, plural).
That's why I went with Wordpress for my blog when I started it last month. It's common. It's familiar. And it's reliable.
Given the drama with Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg and the way Automattic has been (mis)behaving, though, I felt uneasy about choosing their CMS for my blog. But I wanted a dedicated, stable, and extensible option. After all, that's what Wordpress is known for.
But as I was using it, it felt... let's just say it felt long in the tooth (to say the least). It's slow, it's unfocused, and the plugin system is clunky at best.
Ultimately, though, my goal was to enable the IndieWeb plugin and contribute to the growing community of independent site administrators who are embracing the federated nature of the Internet and using W3C protocols for a more social web.
The issue was, though, the plugin didn't behave in the way I wanted and (no ill-will towards the developer) I found it more frustrating and confusing than helpful.
