Editor's note: welcome to the Minimum Viable Changelog! This is a recurring series where I, the faithful developer of Minimum Viable Ceremonies, will attempt to keep you, the voracious and handsome reader, up-to-date with the happenings around developing this thing I find very cool. I'm hoping it's at least one of the following: informative, entertaining, so-bad-it's-good, or SEO optimized. Please tweet me at @gdpelican if you have opinions you'd like to share, and enjoy!
If you're a developer reading this, most likely you've spent several hundred hours of your life wrestling with some 'easy-to-use' blogging platform or another. The same is likely true (perhaps to a lesser extent) if you're a marketer, graphic designer, accountant, or even just someone who's made a hobby website with something like Wix or Squarespace or Wordpress - content management is a hard problem and it is not well-solved in my experience.
We wanted to avoid a platform Medium for this one, as we want to host it ourselves under our own domain, and stay away from monetizing the articles for ourselves or for anyone else (but also please please do try the tool). Arrogantly, we also felt we deserved nice things like embedding, out-of-the-box styling, a nice text editor, etc, without building anything ourselves.
We attempted integrating with Notion, which has an excellent content editor, but no public API, and the reverse engineered solutions were not quite robust enough to justify relying on it. In the end, we ended up propping up an instance of Ghost for a clean, open source editor with solid Gatsby integration.
Here's our initial hacked-together Notion integration:
GitHub
And our transition from Notion to Ghost here:
GitHub