Starting a Blog - Progress Report
I spent all afternoon trying to make it do the one thing I DIDN'T see on Editor.
First of all, let me warn you - blogging is addictive. Second, while all the platforms want you to believe them when they tell you how easy it is - don't!
The Ghost platform that I'm using is, on the surface, user-friendly. If all you want to do is write some text and add some photos, then their claim that it is easy to do has some merit. It has a handy little Editor function that makes it easy to pop your photos or images in; and will even create a gallery of up to 9 photos for a collage effect. But that same Editor has things like, 'Insert a Markdown Editor Card', or 'Insert a raw HTML card'. 'Toggle'. 'Embed'. I'll bet they all do really cool stuff if I knew what it meant.
I spent all afternoon trying to make it do the one thing I DIDN'T see on Editor. After hours of getting Google-smart, (I'm not joking, HOURS) I finally figured out that what I wanted to do required an 'integration'. More hours spent trying to DO an integration, until I finally figured out that I could try 'til the cows came home but unless and until I upgraded to a more premium tier, it wasn't gonna happen. OK, fair enough, there are some integrations included with the standard package and I'll make it work for now.
I discovered that the there is an option to 'upload a downloadable file'. That might have served some of my purpose, but it is fairly limited by its size of only 5 MB. But no big deal, there's still a million things I can learn to do before I'll outgrow what I've got. And I've learned a ton of stuff, by going to the Settings tab and noodling around in all the categories there. You can see what a lot of those things do just as if you were actually using them.
I'm still blindly using the shotgun approach to adding Meta data, 'extra content for search engines', some of it seems redundant but since SEO isn't a huge priority right now, I'm pretty relaxed about it.
Ha ha, notice how casually I threw 'SEO' into the conversation? It's an acronym for 'Search Engine Optimization', and if you do it right, it's what causes your site to be found when people are searching for whatever they're searching for on the Web.
I've still not figured out the Facebook integration yet. Ghost is supposed to work 'seamlessly' with FB, but I don't know, as of yet, if I have to have a correlating Facebook account, or a page linked to my personal account, or just exactly how to put Ghost posts into Facebook or Facebook posts into Ghost. But they do have a pretty responsive e-mail support option, and I'm sure Sarah will give me an answer to my question just as soon as she can figure out what it is, exactly, that I'm asking.
One huge obstacle I'm still overcoming is photo management. I was a little, well, actually a lot, disappointed when I found that Ghost does not allow me to insert photos from my phone. I can edit text through the Android app but can't add pictures. I'm pretty sure I actually read this, so I don't think it's just ignorance on my part. And Google Photos is stingy with sharing across different platforms, so until I can figure out a way to streamline my photos, that's still a cumbersome process involving downloads and flash drives.
But it's all fun, right?