Unplanned Writing and Publishing Hiatus

Despite my blogging endeavours, I have fallen into a writing and publishing hiatus over the past four months. Given the amount of blog posts I consume daily — one of the sources of inspiration and thought triggers, I didn't feel compelled to write. Nevertheless, I decided not to force the issue and allow for the desire to return, naturally. 

The hiatus could’ve been longer had it not been for the fact my Ghost subscription auto-renewed, which lead me to log back into my Ghost Pro account after a couple of months. Whilst taking care of my subscription setup, I decided to tidy things up and reconfigure the site. I also spent time reading the published posts, and what do you know, it triggered the desire to write, and I started digging into my drafts folder to pick up where I left off.

The unplanned hiatus is over! 🙌🏾

Ghost Features

With Chamline remaining on the Ghost platform for the foreseeable future and taking the hosting costs into consideration, I have decided to make the most of the platform's features.

Membership features have been activated to give readers another avenue to receive freshly published entries directly to their inboxes. Perfect for those that don’t use social media or RSS (which you should) to keep up to date. Membership also allows access to start or join conversations with post commenting, should you feel inclined. Whichever method you choose to keep updated with Chamline, thanks for following along.

Site theme and functions

I much prefer the minimal approach in terms of look and feel for the site. Given how Ghost is geared towards Creators, the majority of the themes are designed for Magazine style publications, focusing on huge featured image previews. I am a visual person and that appeals to me, but not to the point it overshadows the most important thing, the writing. This made it tricky finding a theme that ticks all the boxes for my 'less is more' approach to how I want the site to look.

I was pleased, however, to come across the Kyoto theme by Themex that ticks a lot of boxes. It is minimal, it has unique tailor-made page features that would suit my plans to add Slash pages to the site such as; Now page, a Timeline page designed to showcase a ‘linear view of milestones and notable moments’ — a page I’m thinking will be handy for documenting my health and fitness progress. 

I have created a Books/Reading Page to display books I’m currently reading and a Library of completed reads. I plan to do the same for Movies/TV Series. Not forgetting a dedicated mobile photography gallery page, which I’m expecting will need a bit more work to build the way I want.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with the new look and feel of the site. Now on to the writing and publishing!