One could say that I’m out of the trial period for Ghost, due to having written more personal blog posts than on previous platforms.
So I moved my blog out of the AWS EC2 infrastructure and relocated to a data center in San Francisco. I must have created/terminated at least six instances on EC2 to get to a working implementation of Ghost that I liked.
My first stint with Nginx has been positive so far, but limited to just forcing the “www” in my domain. I’m eager to learn more.
Check out the Ghost documentation about using debug mode and exporting your content. Remember to grab your theme and images also. Other than that it is easy.
At the time of this writing the site is still using a free theme, but I made some changes:
- Re-enabled HTML optimizations
- Changed over to minified versions of the CSS and Javascript files
- Worked on the Javascript animation a bit, to address issues with older mobile devices. I’m still not happy, but the experience is greatly improved
- A few back-end changes to improve server RAM utilization
- Changed the network config to what I use on my other production systems
Should you use Ghost? If your needs can be met with a simple non-traditional layout then give it a try. Stick with your current CMS if you still needs include categories or other structured information.
If you haven’t signed up for Amazon’s EC2 service, they may give you a free year of micro-instance service. See how I got my start with Ghost for more info.