Myself on Twitter last night:

My constant tinkering, consistent impatience and distasteful discontent has turned The Newsprint into a victim.

I’m sorry all.

I am truly sorry. Seriously. There’s nothing worse than having to read meta posts every week. And, at my rate, I’ll probably end up deleting my Squarespace account.

…

Of course, I’ve done that as well. Why?

Squarespace is awesome. I am creating a new website for the museum I work at and I have put a proposal forward to use Squarespace. Squarespace is very easy to use, is incredibly quick to learn and is constantly updated. I can’t think of a better CMS for the majority of people. It may even still be the best system for me.

However, I want to try something new. I researched Ghost extensively and stumbled upon Sven Read’s incredible Ghost themes and his free Readium 2.0 theme screamed elegance. I downloaded the theme, opened a free trial account and began tinkering.

And boy was tinkering fun. I couldn’t stop tinkering. Tinkering may be my new online hobby.

Ghost is more challenging than Squarespace ever was, in both good and bad ways. I like how it forces me to learn more about backend code and backend design. At the same time, I don’t like Ghost’s current limitations.

Switching platforms isn’t all about wanting to try something new though. I genuinely need something new.

Over the past few months, I’ve bounced around inside the walls of the Squarespace Newsprint’s narrowly defined scope. By that, I mean talking about productivity, tools, apps, pens and paper can become long in the tooth every now and then. I’ve grown tired of needing to buy new memo books or new apps just so I can write something for The Newsprint.

Like any curious cat, my interests change with the wind. Two weeks ago, I wrote about my mirrorless camera search. I couldn’t help but feel uneasy about posting an article on cameras when The Newsprint’s scope was meant to eliminate photography content. My desire to write overcame scope that time, but I couldn’t guarantee it would happen again.

The last major reason for the switch is because of my incessant pageview worry. A small conversation on Twitter the other day really made me ponder my goals with The Newsprint. I have checked my analytics at least 10 times a day for the past three months and I am constantly checking my Carbon Ads profile to see how much money I made the prior day. I am ridiculous. I know. Don’t lecture me.

So I’m going to eliminate my pageview worries. I have jettisoned the Carbon Ad solely because I don’t want to do this for the money. Carbon Ads have been incredible to work with and I highly recommend their service. I am so grateful for their hard work and their invitation to jump aboard.

Ghost still costs money, however, so I’ve chosen to maintain the “Store” section of The Newsprint. Any products I do review — and I will continue to review products — from here on in will be entered into the store with an affiliate link. If you want to support The Newsprint monetarily, you can do it by supporting developers and business owners as well. They put more work into creating products than I do in writing about them, so they deserve some of your money as well.

The switch to Ghost has three major implications for readers and they all make me want to cry. First, all past permalinks are now essentially useless. Ghost uses a different permalink markup than Squarespace and the amount of effort needed to make all the changes is not worth the time. I apologize for any 404 Errors this switch will cause.

Second, I have to ask all my RSS subscribers to resubscribe to the new RSS feed URL. Squarespace’s RSS statistics were always very volatile and I’m excited to jump over to Feedpress and experience some stability. You can subscribe to the new feed URL here.

Third, although Josiah found an incredible way of importing all Newsprint content from Squarespace to Ghost, images seem to have been lost in the fold. Most articles with photography now show empty photo containers. I apologize for how “constructional” this looks, but I also look forward to replacing those photos with new photos and a new camera. Thanks for bearing with me.

All in all: Ghost, Readium and a new foot forward. I love Ghost’s split-screen writing view and its ease of use. I also like the foundational creed of Ghost’s efforts and I want to support their cause.

I’m also wanting to get back into photography and I think this Readium theme handles both photography and longform writing well. I hope to add some really cool hero images to some posts and I want to try out some in-depth photo essays.

Perhaps the biggest thing that isn’t changing? The Sunday Edition. It’s here to stay and I love curating that list every week. It seems to be a fairly big hit, so the least I can do is continue the best part of the site.

This is easily the most selfish decision I’ve made with The Newsprint. The Newsprint’s growing audience — which actually surpassed 2000 RSS subscribers this past week — is surely going to take a hit after such a switch. I apologize to those readers and I hope you decide to visit from time to time.

For those who continue on with The Newsprint, thank you. I want The Newsprint to be more reflective of me than of the products I use. Although those products are quite reflective of me, they aren’t the whole story. Hopefully the new Newsprint will look a bit more like Josh and less like a robot.

JG