I was born at the very end of the 1970s and technically, I belong to this generation that has been named Xennials by some researchers. This is what Wikipedia says about it :
Xennials are the micro-generation of people on the cusp of the Generation X and Millennial demographic cohorts. (...) Researchers and popular media use birth years from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s. Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood.
I was already a student at University when I started sending my first e-mails, and when I was travelling for long periods of time, it was most common to send letters rather than posting the photos of my trip on social networks.
I discovered Internet in 1998, when I had a student job as an evening receptionist for a consulting firm. We had a laptop connected to the Internet at the reception and that's where I learnt how to fumble with HTML and created my first personal website on Geocities. A few year later, I had a full-time job, an Internet connexion at home and a lot of free time in my evenings, so I created my first blog with SPIP, a publishing system that made the writing process super easy. I enjoyed the process of designing and installing a blog as much as I enjoyed writing articles that I could share with my friends and family, so it was great to later discover the Wordpress ecosystem. I would create new blogs and redesign them completely every couple of years, and it would make me feel like moving to a new place while completely renewing all my furniture at the same time. The exhilaration of the process was deeply satisfying.
Along the years though, I started feeling frustrated by the complexity of this Wordpress unwieldy system. Between the constant updates and the multiple plugins that kept breaking after each update, I felt like I was spending more time trying to fix my blogs rather than writing in them. I wasn't the only one to think so. In 2012, John O'Nolan, a former Wordpress employee himself, decided to create a new blogging platform that would be designed to "simplify the process of online publishing for individual bloggers as well as online publications", and the following year he released Ghost after a successful Kicksarter campaign. In 2014, I started using it and I immediately fell in love with the minimalist tools it provided, including a well designed and functional Markdown-based text editor.
But in the mid 2010s, everybody seemed to have migrated their online lives to social networks - Facebook first - and blogs were losing momentum. So I did what everybody more or less did at the same time : I closed my blogs and started sharing my art and thoughts on social networks too.
Fast forward to 2022, and most of these social networks have lost their appeal. Due to nebulous algorithms and multiple bias in the way they are built, people are leaving these networks en masse, and worry about the use that is made with their data and all the content that is being provided freely to these companies, in exchange of a somewhat limited visibility. I deleted my Facebook account in 2016, stopped posting regularly on Instagram in 2021 and I never really used my Twitter account. The desire to write about my personal projects and share them with like-minded people is still there though. The only difference being that I want to do it on my own terms and bypass the restrictions imposed by social networks with different motivations than mine.
Why I chose Ghost as a publishing platform
This publishing platform exists within two forms : a Ghost(Pro) version that requires to pay a monthly or yearly fee, but is also hassle-free as the website is hosted and updated by the Ghost Foundation itself. And a free, open-source version that can be self-hosted. I opted for this second choice and chose Digital Ocean to host my blog, as they are identified as the first-choice hosting solution by the Ghost team itself.
Then I had a choice between either using the Ghost API and creating my own design fully from scratch - meaning I would use it as a headless CMS - or using Ghost straight after installing it and customizing a theme according to my own needs rather than creating a completely new one from scratch. Because I wanted to focus on creating content first, I opted for the second solution and my work consisted mostly on integrating the design I created in Figma :
As you may see, a few elements have changed between the initial version and the current blog design. This was due to the limitations when creating a Ghost theme : I found it very hard to include JavaScript in my pages, and relying on CSS only has been a big hurdle, especially when it came to the multiple image formats and how to make them responsive in every case.
Because of these limitations, when I'll have the need to update my design I will definitely opt for the headless option that Ghost can provide, and code a front-end completely from scratch. My languages of choice are JavaScript and React, but it will be the perfect occasion to learn a new framework like Next.js.
Despite I felt constrained in terms of design, the platform turned out to be absolutely great when it came to customising the structure of the content. One of the most important point for me was to have the possibility to display my written posts and my comics differently. Being a big reader of webtoons for years, I'm a total fan of the vertical format that allows reading comics on smartphone screens. Thanks to the easy customisation of tags - that can be used as categories within the system - and pages, that's something I could do very easily. The first content I uploaded after making my new blog functional were all my previous comics, scanned and drawn since the mid 2010s. That archive-diving process took me down to memory lane and really triggered my longing to draw comics again.
Overall, setting up this blog has been a very nice experience. There are still a few details to fix, but being able to reach a satisfying result so quickly motivated me to rapidly move up a gear and soon upgrade this blog to a fully bespoke individual publishing platform. My wish is that it will help me to build a community of like-minded creative readers, and eventually to use it as a Patreon-like website to provide high quality content to all my readers.
