Welcome to the new Werd I/O

As of this morning I’ve migrated my website and newsletter onto Ghost. It marks the end of an era for me: I’ve been using Known for twelve years.

Actually, more properly, I migrated my web sites: I now have (almost) every post I’ve written for over twenty years in one place. And you can follow all of it on the fediverse at ben@werd.io — which means, for the first time, that my fediverse handle is the same as my email address.

I thought I’d break down why I did it, how I did it, and what’s next.

Why Ghost?

Ghost is one of the success stories of the open social web. It’s an open source personal publishing platform with a beautiful interface and built-in newsletters, which over the last few years has become targeted towards independent publishers. It powers some of my favorite publishers, like Molly White’s Citation Needed, 404 Media, Platformer, and Mathew Ingram’s When the Going Gets Weird. It’s a little bit like Substack, perhaps, but fully open, and without a commercial relationship with Nazis.

Over the last few months, the Ghost team has openly discussed building in support for the fediverse, which is now live and in beta. That means that Ghost-powered sites can be followed from any fediverse-compatible site. That was enough to push me over the edge. I want my site to be on the fediverse, I want it to load quickly and have a great interface, and I want to absolve myself of having to maintain my own server. Ghost’s hosted offering, Ghost (Pro), gave me all of those things, and works out much cheaper than what I was paying to support my own site with an email service provider powering its newsletters.

Finally, Ghost’s content migration features mean that I could bring all of my posts together. Not only does the new site have every post from the last twelve years — stuff like If I ran Bluesky product and The complicated, liberating metadata of my future children — but also far beyond that. You can find my keynote from the 2008 Elgg conference, my commitment that Elgg will always be open source, and a 2006 rebuttal to the idea that Web 2.0 is Marxism. It’s not quite my complete archive (I started blogging in 1998 and my first seven years are lost to time), but it’s close. That’s really exciting to me.

As a student of open source publishing platforms who has had skin in the game, Ghost is really inspiring to me: a fully open source platform run by a non-profit that has been profitable enough to grow to over thirty employees. That’s a model that lots of other platforms should look to follow.

How I migrated

Known now has a built-in command-line export function that will take the entire contents of your site and export it in Ghost’s own JSON format. On your server, you can just run:

./known.php ghost-export

It will generate multiple export JSON files that can then be zipped up and imported straight into Ghost.

This was a relatively straightforward process, but I couldn’t have built this without technical help from Ghost’s concierge service, who were magnificently helpful and responsive from start to finish. I’ve now got a pretty up-to-date knowledge of that JSON format and its ins and outs — which is not something other Known users will need to worry about.

There was already a WordPress exporter; getting my content from there was a walk in the park. And once all my posts were in place, all that remained was to set up redirects from my old sites to the new one.

What’s cool about Ghost is that, even though I’m on a hosted plan, I can download the theme, make code changes, and upload those changes in place. I’ve made some light customizations, with more to come.

It took a few evenings to get it right, but given we’re talking about twenty years of content, that’s really not a bad investment!

What’s next

I paused on publishing while I was undergoing this transition, but now it’s full steam ahead. I’ve previously posted about my focus on speculative futures, and that’s still the plan: it’s important to point out what’s wrong, particularly in eras like the one we’re living through, but it’s even better to try and paint a picture of what might be better.

But now I’m doing it on a faster, more modern platform, with full fediverse compatibility, beautiful email subscriptions, and backup from an incredibly helpful team. I love it.