I started off today looking at a service called ghost which looked good to me because it is so basic. A blog doesn’t need to have all that many features, and this seemed to hit all the basic points that I needed out of a blog service:
- Supports Markdown (I pretty much write everything in markdown now)
- Basic design, this doesn’t have to be anything fancy
- Easy to setup
What they don’t tell you is that you can’t do anything with the free account you get when you sign up. Why the hell would I pay $60/year for a service whose only useful service, as far as I’m concerned, is parsing Markdown into HTML? I guess it does other stuff too, but this just strikes me as yet another startup that was forced to monetize their platform after it was already built. Since I wouldn’t use most of what their service offered, I figured I could whip something together for free using a library I found on Github called PHP Markdown.
So using this custom made soap box, I will talk about all sorts of things. There will probably be a lot of complaints, and many of them will be Wordpress related, but I will try to keep them coherent and profanity-free (as much as possible, anyways).