Introducing...KRRD on Ghost

I'm a tinkerer. That's not ever going to change. I see something interesting to try and my eyes light up and I say, "oooohh.."

A week or two ago Ghost 6 came out and I thought, "oooohh..." I've actually long admired Ghost. I briefly flirted with an early version a long while ago and found much to like but didn't have much to use it for. Then from around 2019-2023 I ran the website my wife and I shared focused on staying in touch with friends and family on Ghost using the Genki theme. It worked great.

The first version of my blog after moving back to the states used Ghost and I also had a project on Substack that experimented with moving to Ghost as well. The problem was Ghost was more than I can confidently self host in the shared hosting I had that claimed to support Ghost (they had a 1-click installer and all!). The app would crash the account frequently and after about a month I moved off of Ghost and tried to figure out something else. That led to weblog.lol which led to bearblog which led to astro which led to 11ty which has led ... back to Ghost.

I've got a VPS that it runs well on and it's great to get back into it. The new social web features make it a perfect alternative to Substack (really, it was a perfect alternative before but now it's closer to feature-to-feature perfect). I thought about doing something with the Genki theme linked above but it doesn't really vibe with what this site is so I converted my 11ty theme and changed some things up. The homepage shows all long-form posts and links. As long as you have JS enabled in your browser, the link titles will take you straight to the link (and not to my post). The timeline page is basically cloned from my 11ty site and includes my toots and crucial tracks and anything else I decide to add to it. There's RSS for it all. Note: the links and toots and CrucialTracks (and similar) are automatically pulled in. I've got a cron script running that takes care of that so there may be times things need a bit of tweaking - let me know if you notice anything!

I'm not done setting everything up:

• There are design tweaks to make.
• I need to setup mailgun (probably this weekend) so if people want to sign up they can.
• I'll probably setup a couple of member tiers as well but I plan on keeping all content free. The member tiers would be if people wanted to tip, basically.

If you use something something ActivityPub you can also follow this blog there but searching up @krrd@krrd.ing.