This is just a quick update, but I'm excited (possibly over-excited) about why I'm publishing this.
Last year I supported the Kickstarter campaign for a new blogging platform called Ghost. The Kickstarter was a success and the platform has been built. Currently at version 0.4, there's a little way to go before it fully resembles the vision John O'Nolan articulated in his pitch video, but it's already very usable. In fact, everything I was really interested in is already there - the Markdown editor, static pages, and full control over the layout, even with the Ghost.org hosted version.
With my Wordpress 'premium' subscription ending in a few days, now seems like a good time to finally make the switch to Ghost. For the same price I'll get most of the functionality with much more freedom. I will lose some functions, but I'll lose a lot of clutter as well, and be able to continue to support a great product that I really believe in. I'll be writing more about why and how I moved from Wordpress to Ghost in the next few weeks.
Tonight I'll open up the bonnet on hughrundle.net and, all things going well, by tomorrow readers will be pointed to the new platform without noticing any difference. Things usually aren't that straightforward though, so here's a list of some things that might go wrong:
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I could bork the whole domain. To mitigate against this, all content will continue to be available at http://itsnotaboutthebooks.wordpress.com. I've also mirrored the site at http://hugh.ghost.io (which is actually the new site if you want a sneak peek) and (because my father taught me to always have a backup plan) at blog.hugh.li. Check in that order if hughrundle.net isn't working, as the hugh.li site is mostly for experiments and the blog design is looking fairly 1994 at the moment. To find a particular post, simply replace the 'hughrundle.net' prefix with one of the others above, and the rest of the URL will be the same.
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RSS feeds may need to be replaced. I'm a bit unsure about this, but it's possible that if you use an RSS feed you'll need to delete the current one and add the new one, even though once I switch it over the URL will not change.
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Some people might throw things at me when they see what's been sacrificed in the new design. Something else I haven't thought of yet could go hideously wrong.
Wish me luck, and I'll see you on the other side.