14 Sep 2026 2 min read

Hello World (Again)

Re-Introducing https://drewshannon.net - my front door on the internet.

As a quick background, for the last 10–15 years, I've had a pretty kludgy Squarespace + Tumblr + Feedburner setup, with a brief period of sending weekly Mailchimp newsletters. The tech stack was very 2015-coded, with 1,700+ posts dating back to 2010. I was missing a few key modern amenities and hadn't done a full refresh in awhile, so it was time.

I briefly looked at the available options on the market, and quickly settled on Ghost. I don’t care about monetizing my writing or photography on the internet, so its non-profit, open-source, full-featured capabilities were perfect for me. Nice templates to get started, RSS and newsletter support right out of the box, solid Admin API, support team to help with migrations, etc.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t briefly touch on the AI of it all. Using the Google Antigravity harness – primarily with Gemini 3.8 Flash if you’re curious – has made everything a breeze. What would have previously been weeks of manual migration work has been pretty simple.

A few examples of what I’ve used it for:

Version Control: As a non-technical user, GitHub has largely been a mystery to me until recently. But being able to ask Antigravity for changes, have those changes be updated locally and seamlessly pushed to GitHub then Ghost has felt like magic.
Migrated 15 years of archives (4GB+) from Tumblr: Built a Python migration engine to parse 1,700+ posts dating back to 2010, reorganize gigabytes of photography into Ghost's architecture, and map URL redirects so legacy links wouldn't break.
Cleaned up crusty Tumblr code & author weirdness: Scrubbed broken HTML across dozens of posts, fixed author attribution quirks, and pruned hundreds of obsolete tags using the Ghost Admin API.
Wrote and audited accessibility alt-text for 1,900+ images: Analyzed every photo across 1,200+ posts and wrote descriptive alt-text according to established accessibility standards.
Complete tag audit & taxonomy overhaul: Merged legacy tag typos, standardized casing, eliminated every single orphan post, and built out top photography collections (California, Detroit, Film, Leica) with custom hero imagery and intro copy.
Dozens of small UI & layout tweaks: Dialed in typography (Newsreader serif + JetBrains Mono), moved tags to clean monospace pills at the bottom of posts, created a wordmark logo, and more.
Dark Mode: Launched a warm espresso/parchment dark theme with responsive desktop/mobile toggle buttons.

If you have a minute, please poke around (check out the Topics tab to get started). Pardon the dust, but if anything looks broken or if you have thoughts on Ghost, I’d love your feedback.