Ghost Blog

For years I have had this blog running off of Wordpress. I've worked with Wordpress for....gosh, I guess it has been 20 years now. That's crazy to me! Wordpress has become so popular in the past 20 years, I think I remember reading it runs over half the internet at this point. One downside is that popularity has made the platform a target for nefarious actors. An out of date Wordpress is a death sentence. An out of date Wordpress plugin is a death sentence. These days you can't run Wordpress without about a dozen plugins.

The only way to keep this safe is to update Wordpress and it's plugins constantly. Which for someone who is busy with work, and family, and life is very difficult. So for years I have been paying one of the various web hosting companies out there because one of the great features they provide is running those updates for you automatically.

Of course this kind of white glove service costs money, and let's be honest, I'm not popular. So this website gets very little traffic and began thinking about hosting it myself to save some money. The idea of hosting it on my own machine just petrifies me. There is no way I'll be able to keep Wordpress up to date by myself. What other software is out there that I could use?

I looked into a number of different solutions: Jekyll, Hugo, and Grav. These are all static page site generators, which sounded fun to play with. They certainly were. I spun up containers for each on TEST-01 and played with them. But being honest I struggled with them a little bit. None of them really wanted to actually host the website from my understanding, which is fine. But I struggled with getting access to the static files being built in the container. Maybe I had the volumes mounted incorrectly, or maybe I just wasn't fully following the concept and was trying to treat it too much like a CMS. Either way I put a solid amount of time into each and made some progress but never got close to where I needed to be. Time was running low as I wanted to have the website migrated before the current contract with the webhosting company ran out.

So I pivoted and looked into an alternative CMS platform, Ghost. It looks great, and straight forward, and appears to include everything I could possibly need for this site. It seems heavily focused on offering monetization features which aren't something I have interest in for this website but that shouldn't cause me any difficulty. So I fired up an instance in a docker container on TEST-01.

It came up just fine and I had a lot of fun playing around with the settings and migrating my content in.