Shami's Blog

Sysadmin, Because Even Developers Need Heroes

Welcome To My New Blog

2016-06-14

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

About Me

Dev gone Ops gone DevOps. Any views expressed on this blog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

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