Bradtastic / Says Brad

The more I use Posthaven, the more I like it. 

I really liked Silvrback when I first started testing alternative blogging services, but after awhile, I noticed some design choices (flaws?) that bother me. I like the Medium-style layout and structure, but for whatever reason, Safari doesn’t accept Silvrback posts as “articles” for the “Reader” view. Posthaven handles posts in a more straightforward way, but it works. 

I really like the “Insert Read More” option here at Posthaven. I like the flexibility and control of page breaks. As is, I think Ghost 0.4 is an all-or-nothing deal with excerpts. In themes, the length can be modified, but there’s really no control over individual posts. Posthaven’s page break reminds me of LiveJournal’s lj-cut and WordPress’ excerpts. It’s simple, straightforward, mobile-friendly. 

By contrast, on my Squarespace site Says Brad, I need to manually cut/copy + paste the excerpt into a separate field in post settings and options. It’s not clean. i wish they’d adopt a simpler system.

There are still things that really bother me about it, like the theme and the Posthaven logo above the site title. Certainly, for free I won’t complain about these things, but for $5/month (despite being a very good price compared to many other services) I’d like to move stuff around, change the colors, and have my own image (or nothing) at the top of the site. 

Overall, I like Posthaven more than Ghost. 

For now, anyway. When Ghost matures and new features are added, it might turn into something that does everything that I want. I really like the “Next Article” links at the bottom of Silvrback posts — I wish Posthaven and Ghost had that. 

The more I use Posthaven, the more I think that it’d be a perfect tool for personal blogging and even my political site. I’ve been considering using Ghost for my upcoming political blog (something that I hope to have more time for after moving) because it’s so straightforward and doesn’t have comments by default. Although I want to encourage discourse and participation, political sites get a lot of vile, hostile, racist, sexist, physically threatening and utterly nonsensical comments. I don’t think that I have the time or energy to filter through the muck. However, I’m now leaning toward Squarespace v6, Posthaven or something because Ghost just isn’t complete enough as is. 

Perhaps when I have more energy, I can play around with Ghost themes again. 

For now, I still have my main site Says Brad to rebuild and reviews to write for it.

So I’m using Posthaven right now because I contacted them about trial accounts and migrating my information from TypePad, and they said that they didn’t have either. After a short discussion, they enabled this account for me to test. I won’t be able to bring my content from TypePad automagically, but I guess I could manually transfer the most important stuff. I don’t know that it’s worth it normally, but the fact that Posthaven has this “online forever” feature for accounts after a year of service... 

Overall, I’m fairly disappointed that the service doesn’t have markdown support, as it’s my favorite writing environment. The rich text editor is okay, but it feels limiting in some ways, mostly because it doesn’t allow a thought process as free flowing. I think that that’s the best way to describe it, even if paradoxical. Rich text has more options, but it doesn’t feel like more. If I want to add emphasis to a word or embolden it, I can’t simply type my way to it—I need to pause, adjust the cursor, tap/click and keep going. 

Brett (of Posthaven) mentioned that import is a feature that they intend to add along with markdown support, but that the list of things that they want to include is long and they aren’t sure when they’ll be able to get to it.