August Came Early

TL;DR - I'm migrating my blog from Kirby CMS to Ghost. It has nothing to do with the capabilities of these individual platforms. However, I am no longer ready to put in work to maintain my writing setup.

I tend to change my blogging setup almost every August. Either my boredom makes that choice for me, or my setup forces me to that decision. This has nearly become a habit of mine – here's me discussing the same four years ago.

It is August. I like to think I am a writer. Somewhere deep down, I also know, though, that I am first a developer. So every August, I happen to relook at the current setup for my presence on the web, go back to the drawing board and change things.

This year, that time came early, and there are a few reasons for this to happen.

For context, I have been using Kirby CMS for my blog since August last year. I have loved Kirby – it was a platform that gave me the most customisation and control over the experience I could have. I continued to refine the look and feel of the website and the portal I used to publish posts to it.

I never announced my move to Kirby last year, except for a brief mention in one of my posts. There was nothing to say. I liked what the platform provided, and the move was effortless. Of course, it is not without its faults. However, this post is not about going into the shortcomings of Kirby. This post is about documenting my dislike for self-hosting any platform, for that matter.

Throughout this past year, I had to restart the Apache server several times because the website was inaccessible. The availability has generally been pretty good, but the need to take any action, especially logging into a server, is not something I look forward to during my off-office hours.

Recently, while I logged into the portal to write some words in peace, I saw that critical security upgrades were waiting for me to handle. I don't even know since when the critical vulnerability has been open. I do such fixes all the time, but then I'm usually paid for them. I hate the anxiety an upgrade induces in me, and I don't want it every time I log into my blogging platform.

My local Kirby setup was also messing up now and then. Some plugins need minor maintenance. Some incompatibilities. Even the Git setup suddenly acting up.

Standard dev stuff, you say? Of course. But I don't want writing to be dev work.

So, I'm back on the platform with a clean writing interface, available on both desktop and mobile. That supports newsletters as a first-class citizen, so I don't keep two platforms for my blog and my newsletter.

And most important of all, one I no longer need to host. All thanks to Jannis from Magic Pages.