We've converted Koomey.com to use Ghost, an open source blogging/newsletter software
When we first created the Koomey.com site circa 2010, we used Tumblr, which was a capable blogging site. We customized the site (with some difficulty) but it mostly performed well for a long time (almost 15 years).
This past summer we started investigating other options, and soon settled on Ghost. Many companies use it to handle newsletters with subscriptions, but it also works well for blog site hosting. It's open source and pricing is flat fee subscription, rather than a percentage of revenues like Substack (although tiers for bigger orgs and sites cost more).
One of the important learnings from recent technology developments is that commercial sites have a life cycle, and in their end stages undergo what Cory Doctorow has called "enshittification". The idea is that new sites launch to please users, but over time they move more and more to please their investors, which hurts the user experience as the company sucks more and more revenue from customers. It's not a universal law, but it is often true.
Our shift to Ghost insulates us somewhat from enshittification. Their business model is subscriptions and hosting and if their hosting becomes problematic we can just spin up our own Ghost instance (it's open source).
We don't anticipate doing paid newsletters, but Ghost will make that easy if we decide to go that route. The switch involve a bunch of futzing, but the site is looking better than ever, and now we can start thinking about how to tweak structure and content to better serve our clients.
As we worked to convert the site to Ghost, we also realized that the nature and purpose of the site had to shift, from being Jon Koomey's personal site to being a corporate site for Koomey Analytics, the small research company that Jon leads. That led to some obvious changes, but we think it holds together.
Expect more changes and improvements in the near future. Please do get in touch with ideas, suggestions, and new data sources. We're always happy to hear from like-minded data and analysis geeks.
