Yesterday, I saw in my inbox that richstone.io is expiring. So I did what any reasonable person would do in 2026: I talked to Claude Desktop about it.
After a good chat, we decided not to pay €60 for the next season of the richstone.io domain, nor the €13/month in hosting costs. But money isn't really the reason. It's more about the cost of focus and doubling down on impacting what already works.
If you think about starting a blog, here's a little recap of the past 5 years I hope you can learn from. If you are in the closing stage of a blog that served you and others, there will be a how-to on archiving your treasures gracefully at the end of it.
The Journey
RichStone I/O was born in February 2021, about four years after my data-driven engineering blog at richstone.github.io that I did during my computer science studies. Back then, the goal was to level up in my Ruby journey and help other developers who are maybe a step or two behind me get better with Ruby on Rails, APIs, testing and nowadays also AI.
It was a lot of learning and fun doing it. It gave me direction, reflection and purpose.
I made tons of connections. Many people who contacted me through the blog or responded to my newsletter became friends or customers over the years. I had people tell me they reached out because of the silly pictures I draw myself. And whenever I got into a new job, my employer would mention that the blog was one of the reasons they wanted to learn more about me before actually talking to me.
The Specifics
The personal value has been hard to measure, but if I were to describe it with one word: Great. The value for others was OKish from the occasional feedback I've gotten over the years.
In terms of numbers, I watched them every now and then. I can definitely say that when I posted daily or weekly, traffic went up considerably. Otherwise, it trended down, with recent years being worse, given the power of LLM search.
I think Google Analytics doesn't currently go more than the last calendar year, where I had 16K "users" (unique visitors?). I got most reads from the US, China, Singapore, Germany, India, UK, Canada...
286 people are on the subscriber list. Some of them might be spam sign-ups (I had some clean-ups in the past, but Ghost doesn't make it particularly easy to manage dead subscribers). On the bright side, I consistently get 40-50% open rates, which is actually solid.
My guess why this subscriber count over 4 years and ~100 posts:
- My content tried to solve problems but was never solving huge pains. Some posts were OK, there is also a small percentage of posts that were personal updates (I think I rage deleted most of them at some point :D).
- I've rarely done any serious list building (like connecting with other creator's audiences or lead magnets).
I did some sharing on socials, a few posts went trending on Reddit, got decent engagement on LinkedIn a couple times, but this isn't a good marketing strategy for 2026.
The truth is, writing and growing a blog is challenging. And you might get to a point where you want your actions and time to have increasing focus and impact, which is where I am.
I'm also increasingly bearish on text content given the effort it requires versus the potential upside. Video, live groups, events — I'm more bullish on those formats. They're a lot of effort too, but the connection is more direct, the feedback loop is faster.
The great marketer that I obviously am 😄, I'll save the email list and move it to funnelsonrails.com — a project I'll still dedicate some time to this year, so you might hear from me there (unsubscribe anytime, as always). The rest of the time, I will be building AI and integration systems for real products I'm working on most of my day and helping businesses use them (currently, ClickFunnels, my main contract).
(the below is mostly Claude-generated, but it has a fun link to a copy of my website here, archiving a blog on Netlify doesn't take more than 5 minutes 😮)
How To Archive Your Blog
Step 1: Write a Goodbye Post
You're reading it. Let your readers know what's happening and where they can find you next. Don't just disappear.
Step 2: Export Your Content
You have two main options here, depending on your setup.
Option A: The wget Mirror (should work for most blogs more or less)
This is the quick-and-dirty approach. You're essentially taking a snapshot of your entire site as static HTML files.
wget --mirror --convert-links --adjust-extension --page-requisites --no-parent -e robots=off https://yourblog.com/What this does:
--mirror— Downloads the whole site recursively--convert-links— Rewrites links to work locally--adjust-extension— Adds .html extensions--page-requisites— Grabs CSS, JS, images--no-parent— Stays within your site-e robots=off— Ignores robots.txt
The catch: If your blog uses a CDN for images (like Ghost blogs on Digital Press), you'll need to also grab those assets:
wget --mirror --convert-links --adjust-extension --page-requisites --no-parent -e robots=off --span-hosts --domains=yourblog.com,your-cdn-domain.com https://yourblog.com/Where to host it for free: Drop the folder into Netlify (just drag and drop!) or push to GitHub Pages. You'll get a free subdomain like yourblog.netlify.app.
I tried this approach. It kind of worked. Title images showed up, navigation worked, but in-post images were broken. Doesn't work for Ghost blogs that have images inside of posts (which I have plenty of).
Still, Netlify's drop-to-deploy is pretty impressive! Check for yourself:
https://richstone.netlify.app/
Option B: Ghost Export (For Ghost Blogs)
If you're on Ghost (like I was), you have a cleaner option.
1. Export your content:
- Go to Ghost Admin → Settings → Export
- Download the JSON file (contains all your posts, settings, metadata)
2. Export your images:
- For me, I need to get in touch with my Ghost hosting provider.
3. Save your subscriber list:
- Ghost Admin → Members → Export
4. Store it all:
- Create a folder in Google Drive or wherever you keep important stuff
- Put the JSON export, images, and member CSV in there
I'm hosting my blog on DigitalPress, you need to ask for an image export specifically.
Later, you can import this somewhere. I know that if you gonna host with ghost.org, they will help you map your JSON export and images together, at least so they told me.
That's a Wrap
Thanks for reading RichStone I/O over the years!
You can still find me:
- Building at Funnels on Rails
- On Twitter/X
See you around! 🧡