I learned about the Ghost blogging platform today. It looks awesome, especially with its simplified feature set (just what I need, nothing else), strict adherence to Markdown for writing, well-designed multi-platform front-end applications, and so on.

Mostly, Ghost’s speed impresses me. I hate how slow WordPress (the software that powers this blog) is compared to, say, a static website or a Jeckyll blog. I love fast-loading websites, and went out of my way to create static sites for 1000umbrellas.com and plaintext-productivity.net for that very reason.

Unfortunately, I doubt I will ever use Ghost. I am very dedicated to Ulysses as a writing tool, and Ulysses does not publish directly to Ghost. It publishes directly to WordPress, which is the main reason why I use WordPress. (Sure, there are workarounds for publishing from Ulysses to Ghost, but nothing beats a one-step solution.) WordPress is also ubiquitous, making it very cheap and easy to self-host.

I could pay more for faster WordPress hosting, but, considering how few readers I have, I can’t justify the additional expense. So, for the foreseeable future, I will enjoy easy publishing to WordPress via Ulysses, extremely cheap hosting expenses, and my readers will have to wait a second or two for my blog to load. I hope nobody else minds.