Blog Moved (Again)

About a month ago our website moved from WordPress to Kajabi. We moved for marketing reasons. I've been working with a marketing guy and he assured me that Kajabi had a bunch of benefits for marketing purposes. I am sure it does. For blog purposes, I was not very happy with Kajabi as a blogging platform. Being proprietary and closed-source it didn't let me do a lot of the things I wanted to do. Also in the migration process a lot of things got lost and broken. So I decided to split the website and let my marketing team handle the main landing page, and all the marketing stuff, and manage the blog myself. As part of that, I moved the blog to its own subdomain and I switched to a new platform.

Hello Ghost

I had been contemplating moving the blog off of WordPress for a while. If you've used WordPress, you'll know that it is very capable due to all of the plugins. That can also be a problem. Things were getting a little bloated. I wanted something simpler for the blog. I initially avoided moving because I thought it would be a lot of work. Since I had already done a bunch of work to move away from WordPress in order to move to Kajabi, and all I had to do was move the blog and not the entire site, I decided it was a good time to change platforms as well as domains.

I had started looking at Ghost a while ago as an open-source, self-hosted alternative to WordPress. It was very easy to set up a VPS to host it following these instructions. It runs on the cheapest VPS available on Vultr. It doesn't have as much built-in functionality as WordPress, which makes it very lightweight and very fast. It's also very customizable. Instead of PHP, it uses Node.JS. I know very little Javascript, and I've been able to do some small customizations to get the functionality I want. So far I like it.

Migration

The migration process was actually pretty straightforward. I followed these instructions. I first converted categories to tags. This wasn't perfect. I'm going to go back and fix the tags and make sure they are all correct. Then I just exported the WordPress content, updated the URL, and imported it into Ghost. I was even able to migrate the comments by moving to HyvorTalk. So everything made it over to the new platform. I just have to create some redirects, fix a few broken links, and make sure all the tags are up to date. If you notice something that needs to be fixed, please let me know. You can either e-mail me or drop it in a comment and I'll take care of it.

Normalizing Experimentation (and Failure)

One of my core philosophies around software is experimentation. It's hard to tell if a process or a particular piece of software will work until you actually try it. As developers, we need to embrace the idea of trying things out and experimenting. With that comes failure. We need to also embrace that. We need to view failure not as something bad, but as a learning experience.

I moved my blog to Kajabi and it didn't work out. That's ok. I managed to move it over to Ghost and in the process, I learned a lot of new things about managing websites and editing Javascript. I picked up a new commenting system, HyvorTalk which works really nice and is more privacy-focused than Disqus. I also found SimpleAnalytics, which is a nice privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. I count those as wins.