Behind the Scenes
November 4, 2017

A new blog

Previously, Buttondown's changes were in the form of a changelog, hosted generously by the fine folks over at Headway.

Headway is great, but as Buttondown matures there's a lot more content and writing that needs to develop around it, stuff like:

  1. API documentation
  2. a knowledge base
  3. content marketing

This stuff requires a level of sophistication (or, if not sophistication, etymological complexity) that connotes my favorite three-letter word: CMS.

Choosing a CMS these days is just as fraught and hairy of a decision as choosing a tech stack (hell, it is choosing a tech stack), and I batted around a number of options:

  1. I love static site generators, but I wanted an easier deployment process than what they offer. Specifically, I wanted an admin interface that made drafting and publishing easy (especially when I'm away from my laptop.)
  2. I looked at Craft, which had a lot of praise from friends and peers, but the hosting story seemed murky and developing a theme locally seemed painful (I do not want to have to run MySQL just to write some templates!)
  3. Wordpress is, as always, an elephant in every room: but I didn't think I needed the complex ecosystem behind it and wasn't thrilled about the concept of writing PHP.

Meanwhile, I've had Ghost bookmarked for ages. It offers a lot of great quality-of-life stuff out of the gate:

  1. A beautiful admin interface (as seen above).
  2. Built-in support for Handlebars, a great and functional templating interface
  3. A reasonably priced managed hosting offering.

And so, yeah! Buttondown's blog runs on Ghost. I'm excited to explore Ghost's ecosystem more — it's been a delight to work with thus far — and as always, feel free to email me if you have any questions about the platform.

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