Migrating from Elfsight to Ghost
My way from misusing Codeberg for my blog to a very short-lived adventure with Elfsight to the new home of my blog, Ghost
Greetings everyone,
this time there's no code block with info about me. I think that's no more necessary at this point.
At the time of writing this blog post (2026-02-28, 06:18 pm UTC +1), I'm not sure how long it will go. It's probably gonna be a quite short post but I wanted to talk about the reasons on why I publish my posts on Codeberg and why I'm not using Elfsight anymore but Ghost.
Who the hell uploads a blog on something like Codeberg or GitHub???
Why Codeberg?
It's pretty simple, at the beginning I just didn't know any better.
I was thinking about a simple way to upload blog posts with no cost involved. And at that time I didn't have my own website.
Thank's to writing wikis on codeberg, I got more and more familiar with writing markdown files anyway.
So that's it, right? I just did it because it was the first thing I tough about. No.
I knew I could just use AI to write me a simple blog website and upload it to Cloudflare, but something about that idea seemed off.
I know I know, my current website is AI written anyway, but that's not the point. I wanted something simple to manage my blog without much coding or css involved. Something I could do on my phone too when I get an idea.
Get previews of future Blog Posts before I release them here!
Okay but you have Blog website now, so why are you still publishing to codeberg?
There are two reasons for that.
- As a backup. In case I decide to take down the site or some file corruption happens from their site, I'd still have all the blog posts available and can just upload them again.
- Markdown feels easy. I know I can do everything I do in a markdown file in the websites editor too that hosts my stuff. But I feel like I have more control when using a markdown file. I know how to implement the things I need in no time and don't have to click through a menu tu find the option. I just use the keyboard and that's it, no mouse required.
Your first Blog was with Elfsight, why switch?
There were a few things that annoyed me with Elfsight. First, I couldn't implement HTML code so for design and all of that, I was stuck with what it gave me. Now there was an option for custom css and js, but I felt limited with what I can do.
Another problem was in how the site was loaded. I had to implement a Javascript snippet into an HTML file and every time that got opened, the plugin would load. This meant that I couldn't really share links to the blog posts. Instead of it loading an Image and the text title, there was just no metadata available since everything would only load after opening the link.
That just doesn't look good and also wouldn't load my Mastodon Credits in the link preview.
That was a big no for me after realizing that.
There was also a limitation for the free widget on how often it can load in a month. 300 times on the free plan, which might not sound like that big of a problem since I don't get much traffic, but since I sometimes check if everything is correctly loaded and displayed, it could've become a problem in the future.
But besides all of that, I just feel more comfortable with FOSS software. Even tho Elfsight is on GitHub, they are not open source. That brings me to the next topic.
What brang your attention to Ghost?
Simple, it's powerful and open source.
All the problems I described with Elfsight are no more with Ghost. No loading limitations, direct implementation of html and the blog posts are actual html sites instead of just weirdly implemented into one site.
It's fully open source too, which is a big win for me.
To be fair, I was a bit overwhelmed at the beginning with it, but I'm getting more familiar with it every day and it's just awesome.
But didn't you want a free way to post your blog?
That is correct. At the beginning I wasn't sure if I like writing blogs and therefore didn't want to spend any money.
I'm currently debating about if I use the free plan and don't have things like a custom domain or if I invest some money into it. I still have some time to think about it while being in a trial but I'm slightly more on the side of paying for it. I like what I have with that and it's a great way to support FOSS (or FLOSS, whatever you prefer to say).
And with my Kagi subscription, I'd even get 60% off in the first three months, which brings me to about 7€ a month in that time period.
A full post (which will definitely be longer then this one) on the topic of FOSS and why you should support it is planned to release on 24th of May 2026, so I won't go into any more details here.
End words
Ah yes, it's around as long as I thought it would be. Hope you enjoyed the insights and feel free to write me a comment down below if you want me to explain something further or where you just disagree with me.
Note that you'll need an account for that (which is completely free), so I understand if you might not want that.
In that case, open a issue on my Codeberg Blog Repo or mention me on Mastodon.
Weekly posts, sometimes more then one per week, are planned and I already have ideas to fill that until June 7th.
Have a nice day and as always, remember, Stay private. Stay root