My blog is currently running on Ghost 1.0 I’m blogging for almost 20 years, started with blogger.com I think, eventually migrated to self-hosted Ghost when it was pretty new and lightweight. I can host anything that runs on Linux, I can even use Docker.
I don’t want to migrate to the latest Ghost version because it feels very enterprisey now, needs a lot of resources on the server and uses a complex data format instead of Markdown. I don’t need monetization either.
My requirements are:
- possible to migrate ~30-40 Markdown posts + embedded images from Ghost 1.0
- future proof, i.e. simple data format so I don’t get locked in
- low RAM/CPU usage
- easy maintenance, creating posts, backups, etc
- RSS support
I’ll be very grateful for any suggestions.
I’ve already looked into bear blog, I really like the philosophy behind it. The reason I don’t use it is because ideally I want to self-host, and bear blog
is not open-source(edit: cannot be self-hosted easily). Also, I want to embed images in my blog, and from what I’ve seen, you have to either take care of the image hosting yourself or pay a monthly fee. It also looks like the backups are only text, no images, which could make migration to a different platform painful. I had the same issue with blogger.com back in the day, it was possible to export the text, but then the image links were all still pointing to Google’s CDN.Bear blog was open source under the MIT license, and then they changed to a copyleft license in 2025. What I didnt realize is they dont have any selfhosting tooling or documentation which is a shame
Looks like im gonna have to go with mataroa like I originally planned and write some custom css to inject
Oh, interesting! I was wrong about bear blog not being open-source, thank you for the correction! So it would be possible to self-host, it’s just not officially supported. mataroa looks interesting as well, maybe even more minimalistic than bear blog.