DIY or Else
I've been talking to friends about how we exist online, from social media to what our portfolios are like. Someone shared the "Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere" concept and it got me thinking. My product design portfolio also has a smattering of personal projects and instagram has become several accounts all loosely revolving around additional personal projects. It's fragmented and hard to maintain.
I've decided to give Ghost a try and build something that's mine rather than locked into other platforms. Realistically, posts will end up on algorithmic feeds, but posting from the space I own lets me focus on my work, rather than the busywork of manually posting everywhere, or perhaps falling into the trap of "what will do well on this specific platform."
The process of creating is what makes me happy, and that's what I want to focus on.
Quick Summary
- Digital Ocean offers a one click Ghost installation (easy peasy!)
- I've got email up and running with the Mailgun API
- This took me a bit to sort out, but I got there!
- Started manually moving content from Squarespace to ghost
For an alternate path, my pal Chris posted about his experiences with ghost here.
Setback
Ghost's user management doesn't quite meet my needs. You can set posts as "members-only," there isn't a way to simply password protect content. Ideally I could create a portfolio permission and grant access to the relevant folks, but it looks like I can only attach those to paid tiers. (I'm not gonna charge people to read my case studies!)
DIY
I'll figure something out. Simple isn't necessarily easy but there's lots to learn from all of this.