Moving from Substack to Ghost. Phew.

After the last posting I did some more research. One avenue that looked promising was to move this blog over to WordPress, where my "official" professional site is maintained. If you believe what you read it's possible, but once again it turned out to be complex, involve many steps, and ultimately would require setting up an account at MailChimp.

Finally, I accepted the reality and went with Ghost.

Ghost, like some other hosting solutions, does offer a "concierge" service. When I first read that, I was immediately reminded of the last movie I'd watched: John Wick. The concierge at The Continental Hotel in New York City handles everything, up to and including removing dead bodies, cleaning blood from the carpets and walls, and providing Keanu Reeves with a shiny restored 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS as an apology for the problems he'd endured.

Ghost's concierge services aren't quite up to that level, but they are very friendly, and offer a decent amount of hand-holding. However....

The popularity of SubStack is directly related to how very easy everything is. Moving away is an entirely different level of complex.

Assuming you have paid subscribers, you'll need to work very carefully to export all of your posts and your subscriber list from Substack, then import them into Ghost.

You'll need to disable your SubStack connection at Stripe, and enable it in Ghost.

You'll need to delete the subscribed people from SubStack.

You'll need to set up the email forwarding with your ISP so that Ghost can send using your preferred address. And you'll need to move your domain name over to your Ghost installation.

Ghost does have good instructions for all of these, but it's finicky work, and needs time and attention to detail. And much of it has to be done in the right order to work. I've spent much of five days doing this.

And note that Ghost support works "from 9am in Central Europe right through to 5pm on the US East Coast, Monday through Friday." if you're on the West Coast you'll need to plan for mornings to get things done.

Note: If you don't have paid subscribers, or a custom domain name, this is all much, much easier.

The other aspect of all of this is cost: a Ghost Pro account, which will allow you to have paid subscriptions, will cost you $29 US a month - more than I actually see in subscriptions right now. (Yes, that's a hint.)

Note: right this moment, Ghost is offering 50% off for the first three months.

And you'll be looking at finding a theme package that matches what you want or need. The free ones are OK, but more complex or good-looking themes are again not cheap.

My background in web development dates from the days when HTTP wasn't followed by S, and when PageMaker was the tool of choice. One look at the arcana of theme development in Ghost is enough to scare me off.

At the end of the day though I'm happy with Ghost. It does what I need, wasn't TOO difficult to move over to, and best of all, is (as far as I know) free of Nazis.

Which was, of course, the whole point of this exercise.