I guess, there should be a well in-depth guide on how to transfer from a Ghost powered blog to write.as/writefreely powered one
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May I ask what prompted your interest in migration from Ghost to Write.as?
In terms of usability and features, Ghost is probably my ideal platform but their pricing for the managed hosted version is way too much for my budget.
No. I haven’t moved from Ghost to Write.as. I am just stating that there should be an article for those who may need it.
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I am contemplating moving from Ghost to Write.as, but unfortunately not all features I would like and need are available on write.as yet. I will write a post until the end of the week where I will describe my use case, reasons to move and my pros and cons etc.
I used my own exporter / importer scripts for to get my posts over. I could clean them up and put them on GitHub.
I wanted to write a blog post about my blogging needs and what I need to migrate to write.as. But if people think it would be beneficial, I could write it here on discuss.write.as.
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Yes, I’d be interested to hear about your exporter/importer script. Either a blog post that you could reference here on discuss.write.as or a direct post here would be appreciated.
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I would love to see your import/export scripts as well, @jason! I have hundreds of blog posts that I would love to migrate over to Write.as. I have just switched over from a self-hosted Ghost blog to Write.as for reasons that include the following:
- Ghost’s new editor is not mobile-friendly. The Write.as editor works great on mobile, and once the 2.0 mobile apps are released, that will make it even easier.
- The Write.as principles aligns much better with my own values and ethics
- Ghost is not good at handling images - I’m hoping snap.as will be a better solution
I know an official Ghost importer tool is on the roadmap: https://phabricator.write.as/T543
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Sorry guys, I was quite busy the last two weeks 
. I hope I’ll get some time to partly rewrite, clean up and release the scripts on the weekend or until mid next week. I used some hacky things with hard coded values as it initially was only intended as a crutch to help me move over. I’ll update this thread once its done 
.
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@jason if you don’t mind, I’d be curious to learn what prompted your shift from Ghost to Write.as. Perhaps you like the minimalist approach of Write.as and didn’t need all of Ghost’s features?
Hey guys,
sorry again for the long abstinence. Work is keeping me busy and at the moment I do not have much energy left in the evening to work on my private projects. I used the weekend to clean up my script and make it ready for prime time, so to speak. You can find the script now on GitHub. I just used a fresh export for testing and got it imported.
To be honest @fjhvio, I have not moved yet fully to write.as. At the moment, my main blog will stay where it is. That has multiple reasons – let me try to explain a couple of them:
I am hosting Ghost myself on a VPS with a German company. I am German myself, so the machine being in Germany and therefore being protected by strong European and German privacy laws does not make “data privacy” a top concern for that particular blog.
Hosting the blog myself does come with some operational overhead though. I have to monitor the systems involved and make sure the operating system, the database and the Ghost application itself is always running and up to date. Even though I have automated a lot of tasks and use Docker and other technology to keep it compartmentalized and portable, it is very much a “hassle” I do not want to deal with long-term.
That being said, I am looking for a solution that can make me fully independent from any platform:
- I want to write short micro posts and then post them to Twitter or Mastodon (as tweets or toots).
- I want to be able to write quotes, or publish commented links to videos / images / stories (similar to the quote, link, aside and image post formats on Wordpress).
- Last but not least, I also want to be able to write long blog posts which include a feature image and also a small image gallery, or at least an easy way to arrange these images inside the post.
All of that, I want to be able to do without much hassle, of course. And an API with web hooks should be included too . You see, I am very easy to please 
.
Write.as is almost there. But unfortunately at the moment only almost. These are the features I am currently missing:
- The current theme is a start, but if you want to have a logo or “fake” different layout for the different post types, you have to use a lot of CSS and it can get complicated. More ways to customize would be great – or if there is a nice, light default theme that is able to display the aforementioned post types. I’ll take that!
- Combining pictures to small galleries, or allow different picture styles (e.g. different width, color overlay) is currently not easily done. You would need to write HTML or Javascript and upload the pictures somewhere else.
With Ghost I am currently writing my own theme, which offers a lot of flexibility. That also allows me to add picture cards and have different picture widths etc. The new API and the web hooks allow me to post to Ghost and also react on new things (like new posts, new posts with a certain tag etc). This makes the Twitter and Mastodon integration easier.
Don’t get me wrong. I do love Write.as!
I love that I am not a faceless customer and the idea of that data privacy and data portability are built-in right from the start. And that, if I want to, I can host it myself and take my data with me.
It’s a refreshing mentality and I am happy to be a Pro customer, even though my main blog is not yet on the platform. I also like the email subscription and the ActivityPub integration and I am very anxious to see how the project evolves – especially with the upcoming snap.as development.
But to move with my main blog, I need to be 100% happy with the platform. And we are not there yet.
That being said, I’ll be around.
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@jason It only took me 10 months, but I finally tried your ghost-to-writeas script and it worked great!
The whole thing started off with an e-mail from Let’s Encrypt to notify me that the SSL/TLS certificates for the server running my Ghost blog won’t be renewed anymore because the software is too old. I tried updating Ghost, but as usual it did not go smoothly. I sometimes wonder if Ghost makes it intentionally hard to upgrade to get people to rather use the hosted version instead.
I spent hours trying to get Ghost up and running again, but finally gave up around midnight and went to bed. This morning I remembered that you posted your scripts here, and it only took a couple of minutes to set up and get started. And now I was able to migrate 168 blog posts over from Ghost to my Write.as blog. Thank you! 
PS: If I did this 10 months ago, I would’ve saved $65 in hosting costs! 
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Awesome, thanks for the feedback! Glad it helped you migrate your posts! 