In 2014 I wanted to start a tech blog about my Sitecore journey. I was looking for a blogging platform which is “by developers for developers”. I didn’t want a rich editor where I had to format everything with a toolbar and a mouse click. I just wanted to prepare my blog posts in notepad (or similar) and copy them to the backend of the platform, in markdown.

After some research I found Ghost, an open source blogging platform written in Node.js. The first public version of Ghost was released in October 2013, after a successful Kickstarter campaign. I love to support startups and new ideas, so I wanted to try it out and subscribed to a Pro account for about $100 per year.

From the beginning I was enthusiastic about Ghost and blogged a lot. The user interface is very clean and the posts could be written with ease. I am still a big fan of Ghost and the features they have released so far.

But time is changing, and unfortunately also the frequency of my blog entries. My last active blog post was is 2016, 4 years ago. After years of paying my pro account without actually using it, I decided to migrate my blog to something else which I can use for free. A few weeks ago my friend Pascal started a new blog with Gatsby.js (and was impressed by it). So I thought this could be my new platform as well.

The goal was to migrate my blog 1:1 from Ghost to Gatsby, with all the styles, all content and all the URLs. I started with the blog starter from Gatsby, which already contains most of the needed features. With some help from Pascal’s source code and the sources on the Internet I was able integrate the missing parts like paging, tagging, etc. with ease. Porting the theme was also very straight forward, as I could just copy & paste the CSS and split the components into React components. In the end, I could also simply copy the entire content from Ghost into my new markdown files.

8 days after the first commit, my blog has been fully migrated to Gatsby and is running smoothly on Netlify. The source is available at Github. After all, the developer experience with Gatsby is really great and I hope to find more time to write blog posts again. I have a lot of ideas and interesting stuff to share :-)