Shami's Blog

Update: I have since migrated to Hugo which seems to be better maintained and generally easier for me to update. I have also started using Texts more for editing Markdown

I haven’t been very active on this blog over the years, one of the reasons was Wordpress itself; As nice as it is, I grew sick of updates always breaking something. Another thing that always made me feel uneasy was the email I got every once and a while from my blog telling me it updated itself. True, this is good when people ignore their blogs but I didn’t feel in control of my own blog any more and sometimes I wouldn’t have enough time to debug any plugins that broke when the blog decided it was time for me to upgrade.

So after looking around I found ghost . It seemed like a nice idea so I set up a small server to test it out and managed to import all my Wordpress content without much fuss. ghost allowed me to focus on content and I manged to write more posts in a week than I did the previous year with Wordpress; With wordpress I had to delve in the source of my posts more often than I liked. With Markdown I was able to focus on my content which made the experience a lot more enjoyable.

I’m a big fan of FreeBSD and use it on almost all servers I manage. When I tried to run ghost on my production server I ran into the issue of getting the node.js web server to automatically start. It took me a couple of hours because for whatever reason the scripts I found online were not working for me.

Once I got that to work and configured nginx as a reverse proxy for my blog, it was time to find a theme. Given the fact that I don’t know any useful HTML to make a blog look decent I started looking for anything available for download. Then I was disappointed to find that there hasn’t been any update to ghost for some time and that the themes were not as good as I’d hoped.

I ended up checking static site generators and decided to give Hexo a try. It was simple enough to get things working and hosting it with nginx was quite trivial. As for content migration I used a slightly modified version of the script available here .

I still preferred the Markdown editor that ghost provided and in my search I found StackEdit and Dillinger which are even better for my simple needs.

Hopefully I can provide more consistent updates from now on