For the last year this website was hosted on the open source Ghost platform.

For those of you that don’t know, I’ve held a 15+ year career in the WordPress space. From running my own agency, to hosting the leading podcast covering WordPress news. If you’re a non-technical person, having dipped your toe in WordPress, you could probably count the number of times you wanted to throw your laptop. More on that later.

However, I’m happy to announce that this website is now hosted on WordPress.com. Quite a bit different than self-hosting your own WordPress install with a trusted web host.

Why did I pick WordPress.com versus self hosting my own WordPress.org version?

Email lists and newsletters.

The one thing podcast hosts don’t provide audio creators with are the means to build an email list and publish a newsletter. Hosts like Transistor allow me to connect to places like Mailchimp and ConvertKit, but as a die hard WordPress advocate, I wanted to see what WordPress.com has to offer. They’ve been touting their “Creator” features for a while, lets see if it lives up to the hype.

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

If you’re not familiar with the industry, WordPress.com is developed by Automattic, a commercial entity started by Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of the open-source version of WordPress which is found at WordPress.org.

Emphasis on the .org in that paragraph.

I won’t dive too deep into the rabbit hole of the pros/cons of self hosting WordPress versus paying for a $300/year business account at WordPress.com, but it boils down to me wanting to see how Automattic serves creators like us through their product suite of hosting, Jetpack, and their newsletter service.

The good news is that if you do pay for a business account like mine, you can run WordPress plugins that have been approved on the platform, much like you would in your self-hosted website. That means I can use Gravity Forms for my intaking the podcast setups I’m publishing here on this site.

Bonus: My day job is at Gravity Forms helping with the product, marketing, and publishing the Breakdown audio podcast.

Gravity Forms helps me streamline the publication and newsletter building funnel on WordPress.

And that’s what I missing from Ghost.

Ghost is a fantastic open source publishing platform, and I encourage you to look at that platform if you’re non-technical and you want something as an alternative to more commercial platforms like Substack or even “Twitter bro” favorite, Beehiiv. (I’m testing the platform on another project, Breaking Content.)

On Ghost, I found myself stitching together a few difference services in order to intake user generated content, and get it posted to Ghost.

With WordPress + Gravity Forms, I can have you send me your podcast setup through the form, and all of that data is piped right into a new WordPress post, drafted, ready to publish!

The Podcast Setup is a side project for me, the more automated and hands-off I can achieve the more I can do on the promotional side of things.

The Takeaway

I’m a huge fan of open source.

Not just because you can hack away at it and write or install code to add a deluge of functionality, but that your content is (hopefully) insulated from big platform politics.

The current landscape of newsletter platforms, social platforms, and YouTube channels increase our risk for loss of ownership.

Freedom to publish and distribute is the part I love about RSS podcasting.

Platforms like WordPress and Ghost open up the same freedom for your website and your blog posts.

Your content isn’t lost to an algorithm.

When you want to move, like I did, it’s a clean process. I encourage you to look at WordPress (or Ghost!) for your podcast website. Feel free to hit reply and let me know if you have any questions.

In the meantime, send us your podcast setup to share with our audience. It’s free!