idearik.com
Personal blog, build with Ghost.
Almost 30 days after the 400 subscribers milestone, my small personal blog now has 500 subscribers to the newsletter.
But, I also decided to change my newsletter frequency from weekly to monthly. I just don't have the mental capacity to write a weekly newsletter anymore.
On the other side, I can promise a better newsletter content quality in the future. Now I have a full month to do research, write and edit the newsletter, instead of 7 days.
I got 105 new members for my small personal blog in 20 days! Yay!
Earlier this month, I migrate my blog to Ghost. After all the dust settles down, I'm experimenting with Ghost and enable the build-in Member feature.
For a moment, I was thinking about premium membership, before found out that Stripe Payment not available in Indonesia. So... Free membership!
How I implement it
There were some blog posts that already generated traffic for my blog, mostly provide a long list of links to access some files on the internet for FREE.
So... I locked the blog post behind "member-only" and got 105 new members/email lists in 20 days. :)
I really want to migrate to Ghost since the end of last year, but... then realize my technical capabilities are not that good.
Why Ghost?
I just got bored with WordPress, and Hugo seems too complicated for my small and personal blog. I changed back to WordPress in August 2020, because of Hugo just too much for me.
Then, I found about Ghost. But, their cheapest option is $29, it quite a lot of money for me. And my blog currently on $0/mo revenue :D
Migration in A Day
So, I just finished all my tasks yesterday, have some time to kill before dinner...
- Search about how to setup self-host Ghost
- Order smallest Droplet on Digital Ocean
- Setup Ghost
- Install Theme
- Export my content from my WP blog
- Import it to Ghost
The 8 Hours Problem
So, my WordPress blog is quite large, ~500MB of files(JSON + Content). The big problem when I try to import it to my Ghost, the server rejects it because the files too large.
I spend 8 hours on the Ghost forum and other people's blogs with similar problems, try to increase the NGINX server upload size but no luck.
Then, I just got this stupid idea when I just want to give up and go to bed.
How about import the JSON only, then... Import/Upload the images directly to the server using SFTP?
Try it and... It's done! 8000+ images need more than 8 hours to complete because of the low specification VPS that I used.
Now, the conclusion? I just love my new blogging platform, it faster than WordPress but not as complicated as static-site.
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1
Nice! I've been intrigued by Ghost for a while; they're doing some great stuff. Currently messing with Hugo a good deal too--I agree, it's a bit complicated despite claims otherwise, but fun to tinker with.
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Yeah! I actually loved Hugo, but I tinker with it too much :). I spend more time coding (learn how to code) than actually writing content for my blog. For now, I will stay with Ghost.
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After working on the migration of my personal blog from WordPress to Hugo for a week, I finally can share the first iteration of the Hugo version.
Twitter update: https://twitter.com/idearik/status/1246785732200378369
It still so much to go: redirect the URL from the old domain, add comment system and more. I hope to complete it all at the end of April or early May.
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