Migrated blog from WordPress to Ghost and changed domains!

Why move from WordPress to Ghost? A few reasons, but from a “how it compares with WordPress” perspective, the baked-in newsletter functionality.

While it’s possible to “bolt on” email newsletters to a WordPress site, it’s far from seamless, and I wanted to give Ghost an honest try, considering the strides they’re making in open source blogging.

I’ve also changed URLs to the more SEO-friendly veronicaexplains.net. Using a dot net instead of a dot sh will help with email deliverability as well.

Lastly, Ghost has been pioneering new ActivityPub integrations, and I’m working on using Mastodon less and less. Relying on Ghost for those sorts of “ActivityPub blasts” is something I’m keen on trying.

So what happens to vkc.sh?

I will be winding down this WordPress install, and over the next few weeks I plan to start replacing blog posts with redirects to their counterparts over on the new site. I’ll likely update the posts over there as well, for instances where stuff/instructions have changed.

As far as the merch store, for now it remains active, but I will likely move the merch store to a new WordPress install at a different domain. I have a few ideas for that and my wife and I are eager to give them a try. We’re likely sticking with WordPress not because we love it, but because we’ve gotten to know WooCommerce quite a bit and our dropshipper supports it well.

Separating the “merch” from the “explaining” is a natural thing- most of my followers don’t care so much if hoodies ever come back, and folks who visit this site for snarky t-shirts don’t care about how Kdenlive’s flatpak works. Separating these two concerns will make marketing things a bit easier, as well.

Eventually, I plan to redeploy vkc.sh as a URL shortener for my work. More to come on that. 🙂