Why I chose Ghost...

For the past 3 years I was happily posting away once every few months on Medium, just little things that I would do at home and I thought may be useful to others.

After a year or so I signed up for the medium partner program where you list your posts exclusively for members and then get paid for views, fans and claps etc.

Every month i would get £0.50p, it is not exactly rewarding and medium does not allow you to just list the post as public and let both types of users (paid and free) to see it. It was not about the money but more the control they had on the content.

I had looked previously at static site generators, hugo or gatsby for example but I didnt want a learning curve or to have to dedicate too much time to creating the "platform", on top of that you have to add other components/services that help you along the way such as sanity.io/contentful/netlify. If you like JS and you like all the moving parts then by all means go for it but I wanted something simple, an all in one and everything I wanted led me to Ghost.

It is free when self hosted, it has a slick and clean admin/user panel. It integrates with lots and lots of 3rd parties, and a tiny thing that I can do...I can change the syntax highlighter colours in posts which I could not do on medium.

To sum up, we all make decisions based on our personal requirements and I feel I chose the best platform for my needs. I will start over the next few days writing up posts on how I set this all up incase anyone wants to do the same