Octopress has treated me well over the years, but with the advent of more modern blogging platforms like Ghost I decided it was time to switch. Check out my new ghost blog!
Ghost advantages
- Open source for hackability.
- Hosted and self-hosted offerings, with easy migration either direction.
- Very clean interface like Medium.
- You own all your content, unlike Medium.
- Extensible with plugins and themes.
- Easy to inject markdown snippets or embed many types of content.
- WYSIWIG editing straight from the browser is really nice and feels like a faster workflow.
- There are options to create a paid newsletter (a la substack).
Ghost disadvantages
- Since it’s not a static blog, you can’t just push to github pages and be done with it.
- Self-hosting is a bit of a pain. My server ran out of memory and I ended up throwing in the towel and going with the Ghost Pro hosted version for now. (though I can always easily go back later, which is nice)
- Ghost Pro costs money.
Octopress advantages
- When published to github pages, you get an amazing lightning-fast hosting service completely free.
- Markdown-centric means the content is very portable to other places that natively support markdown.
Octopress disadvantages
- Maintaining the ruby tooling can be a bit of a pain. Upgrading is scary, so I got stuck at an old version.
- Extensibility seemed like a pain so I personally didn’t bother.
- Feels a bit archaic at this point.