Announcing Ghost!

Hey all! Big news today!

As of yesterday, Posts has officially migrated from Jekyll over to Ghost CMS, and I'm super stoked about it!

I apologise in advance for the broken hyperlinks, especially for those of you who are coming here from whoever linked me on Reddit. Hopefully the new coat of paint on the site will make up for it. :)

Now, I'm sure there's probably some questions. If you've read my Hello World article on this site, you'll know that when I started this blog, I specifically argued against using a CMS like Substack and stated that I wanted to homebrew my own site using Jekyll. I originally attributed this to "ADHD" and "Hyperfixation" in an attempt to be cute. (and maybe also fueled by late-night mania? I don't remember.) In retrospect I realize that it was a really half-baked answer, as there were multiple reasons why Jekyll was the best option at the time.

I've always had an issue with subscription services. I hate them, and I'll only pay them if absolutely necessary. Spotify I pay for because I listen to over eight hundred and thirty hours of music every year, almost 2.5 hours every day, and the $5/mo student pricing makes it well worth budgeting for. Cloud VMs on the other hand are not necessary. The idea of paying $60 a year for a t2.micro instance makes my skin crawl, especially when a Raspberry Pi 4B is only like $35. (If you can find one, that is.)

Hosting didn't seem like the best option to me, especially when compared side-by-side with other free options, like Github Pages. Pages supports Jekyll, a static-site generator that allows you to write content in Markdown, and Markdown is one of my favorite markup languages! I didn't mind the extra dev time up front if it meant the site was free, so it was the perfect solution for me at the start!

However, with every hour spent rambling in the drafts folder, this project grew bigger and bigger, and eventually tech debt began to be a concern. Sitting down and programming the site was a fun afternoon, but maintaining it proved to be a hassle. It was time to look for a better solution.

Tangentially, I've spent the past year or so working on infrastructure in my new apartment. It originally started with an Xfinity router and a single 2015 Mac Mini, and has now grown into a 12u rack in my closet with an OpenWRT router, 12TB NAS, 1U UPS, Several Pi's in a K3S cluster, another M1 Mac Mini, and a ThinkCentre M93p running Windows + Docker. (I think I'll probably write a post about my homelab journey soon, in case you're interested in more details.)

Revisiting the idea of migrating from Jekyll, what wasn't feasible a year ago is now possible, thanks to the new silicon in my closet. I've been getting into selfhosting lately, and Docker Hub + r/selfhosted spoke highly of Ghost, an open-source CMS. Ghost is a really robust program by itself, but has lots of integrations with other tools like Disqus, N8N, and Mailgun, to help me expand upon the blog without spending countless hours engineering those kinds of solutions myself. A future with Ghost looked very promising, so I decided to give it a shot.

That said, what you're reading right now is being hosted on my very own K3S cluster, and is exposed to the internet via Cloudflare Argo Tunnel, a cool tool that allows me to publish content to the internet without having to port forward. I'm very happy with this solution, and am looking forward to seeing how long this solution will take us into the future.

Thoughts? Concerns? Comments are down below. Let me know!

Till next time!

UPDATE 7/25/2022: I've also added a Privacy Policy to the site, just out of pure "cover your own ass" motivation. This site is pretty simple and was designed to use as little tracking as possible, so I don't expect privacy concerns to be an issue in the future. Just keeping things legal!