A plethora of publishing platforms were introduced in the practical sessions of the Digital Anthropology course, including UCL's MyPortfolio and Wordpress. I selected the open-source blogging platform Ghost and Github due to the considerations below.

Open Source Technology

Projects such as the Linux kernel (MacKenzie, 2005) and Creative Commons are both technological and political projects. With this awareness in mind, I decided to stick to an open source technology to experience its political agency.

MyPortfolio is open-source and freely available to UCL students, but its functionalities are limited. There are very few customization options, particularly in theming. Its location on UCL servers also poses questions about preservation since I cannot be sure how long the contents will remain there.

Wordpress is one of the most popular blogging platforms on the Internet, and the self-hosted version is open source¹. Still, I thought it would be fun to experiment with a lesser know open source platform—Ghost.

Ghost

I have been following the development of Ghost for several years. Ghost was a crowd-funded project² in 2013 with emphasis on composition in Markdown³ and easy content management system. The support of Markdown writing was the main "selling" point for me since I am very accustomed to writing in the light markup language.

Markdown makes it easy to mark different sections in a post with different hierarchies of headings, and this affordance has influenced the way I compose posts on this blog. Hopefully, presenting words in different chunks also allow the reader to choose the sections of interest and devote different levels of energy to them.

In order to run Ghost on the local machine, the prerequisite is to install node.js first, and the official website has detailed documentation⁴ on how to set it up.

Github

Github is mainly used by programmers to host software projects, to collaborate with other programmers, and to perform version control. However, it also provides the service Github Pages which users of Github can use to host their personal websites.

Technical Difficulties

The natively supported blogging platform on Github is Jekyll⁵, and not having invested time in the Jekyll blogging engine previously, the only option for me was to look for methods to deploy Ghost onto Github Pages. I have benefited immensely from this tutorial⁶ by typing in the commands into the console.

Was it worth the hassle?

In a word, yes.

As scholars such as MacKenzie (2005)⁷ and Kelty (2008)⁸ have argued, software can be seen as the manifestation of sociality, and my experience of being involved as a user has been rewarding on a personal level.