Step 2: dogfood everything

Dogfooding something is a well-known concept in the software space. It's similar to "practice what you preach." I believe solidly in open-source, so finding a solution that matches was critical. This website is built using open-source software called Ghost. I recommend checking it out and in this post I'm going to lay out why.

Ghost has a variety of options from hosted solutions at various pricing depending on your needs. They'll take care of all the under-the-hood work for you. The software itself is freely available allowing you to run your own instance. I've used Digital Ocean for years. They have a droplets available with pre-installed apps and ghost is one of the options.

I tested 3 different methods of getting set up with ghost. I'll explore my reasons for requiring an open-source solution in a later post, but for now. Given that I wanted to have a web presence, leverage software that I understand and can replicate myself, and then have the ability to move my data wherever else I may want to go - the only clear solution was ghost.

I've spent my entire career working in the open-source world of WordPress. So this move to ghost may be somewhat surprising. The reality, as ever, is choosing the right tool for the job. For me, I wanted ease of setup and specific functionality (a blog and a paid subscription option) and ghost made the most sense. You could easily do the same with WordPress.

but I went with ghost over substack or threads, or squarespace or wherever because here i can do what i want. i'm dog-fooding this. i'll have to figure out all the intermediate steps, but yeah, this is the best option for me right now and i'm excited to learn more about the themes and options.