Moving from Blogger to Ghost

I like Blogspot / Blogger but it does not support Markdown and I love Markdown. I mean I friggin love it. So simple, pure, and aesthetically beautiful. Furthermore with Ghost's write in left pane and preview in the right pane, editing is super easy. Now writing blogs is fun again!

But with wanting to use Markdown and Ghost came the issue of:

1. Where should I host it?
2. Should I go for my own domain name?

Spoke with a couple colleagues of mine and discussed blogging in general and the purpose of it.

Where should I host it?

I tried different blogging platforms that already host Ghost but they were providing a minimal set of themes for the free or the base price one and I did not want to be locked down with a basic theme. Plus, this is a new interest for me, actually more like a reawakened interest, and so I didn't want to pay a monthly fee just yet. I mean I get great commenting, analytics from blogspot for free. So to pay for a blog is a foreign concept for me, kind of something I would need time to get used to. So I went with AWS which provides a free tier for a year. And, it's working out awesome so far!

Should I go for my own domain name?

I wanted to blog for a couple reasons:

1. I am getting to play with some really cool technologies to solve some interesting problems at work. Knowing my memory, I did not want to lose my findings.
2. I wanted other people to benefit from my observations/heart aches/head aches. In other words, not to have to go through the pain I have gone through to figure out something.
3. Albeit a little selfishly, I wanted my own presence on the web.

So I went with my Twitter handle.

More posts about my experiences with the migration coming up next in the series...