I’ve had a love/hate relationship with blogging over many years. I’ve started this journey with Blogspot, moved to Windows Live Pages, used Jekyll for the last few years but finally moved to Ghost last year. I still don’t feel at home with Ghost as it lacks the basic comforts like proper mobile editing, reusing existing components, and it’s just too much content creator oriented. Every post you make requires a lot of hoops to jump through.
Yes, I could use a social media platform like Mastodon and host it myself if I wanted to, but I’m not looking for connection here. I just need a corner to say a few things from time to time.
Because Ghost works best on desktop, I sometimes blog on my laptop. But that works best if you want to post something long-form. If you want to quickly say something or share an image, it’s difficult. Ghost’s mobile editor is terrible and they don’t have an app yet.
That’s why I started to use Ulysses as my post editor. I tried iA Writer before, and although it’s a decent editor I also had a challenging experience with it. In this particular instance, no image support on editor. I still don’t feel at home with iA Writer but I love that it keeps things as markdown files.
Ulysses has very good integration with Ghost: You can choose tags, feature image, slug, etc. right from the app. It also has inbuilt grammar check, so you don’t have to run to Grammarly every time you want to write something.
It’s still an additional step to post something and image posting is still not smooth, but it’s better than nothing. There isn’t a good blogging platform that offers all, and don’t even get me started on Medium. Like I said before, everyone is trying to sell something online and Medium is one of the worst, especially with the click-bait story titles.
So far my experience with Ulysses is smooth but we will see if the £35 cost is justifiable.