Returning to my Blog
If you look at the date on some of my previous posts, you'll soon realise that it has been a really, really long time since I've written a post. There are numerous reasons for this - mostly laziness. But, there are some real ones, too.
One of my biggest issues with self-hosting Ghost was the hit-and-miss reliability of updates. You can follow the upgrade documentation to the letter, and some days, it just wouldn't work. Everything would fall to pieces, and you're left restoring a backup. If you remembered to make one.
In the end, I just no longer had faith in the platform. Why bother writing something if I'm going to have to fight my way through the next upgrade to keep the post online.
It's not that I'm incapable of maintaining the server or the installation. I manage thousands of devices and servers every single day. And I think that's where some of the problem was. I've just spent all day doing this, I would rather not have to do it in my spare time, too. So, I didn't. And, eventually, my desire to keep writing posts just dropped off. Which is a shame, because I used to really enjoy writing absolute bollocks.
Over the past year(ish), I looked in to various options to find a replacement for my blog. They included, but aren’t limited to:
- Wagtail
- Statamic
- Publii
- Astro
- Ghost
- Bear Blog
- WriteAs / WriteFreely
- Hugo
- Medium
- Substack
- GravCMS
- Gatsby
- Kirby
- Blot.im
- Telescope.ac
- VuePress
Out of that list, Substack was by far the easiest choice. It offered everything I needed. And, it was possibly the biggest mistake I made in terms of enjoyment.
I ended up splitting out the things I wrote about in to separate entities. I kept my personal stuff, which never saw an update again. Despite me having a really long list of drafts.
My running and fitness content became its own thing. And, I did actually have plans for this. But, shortly after, I got COVID-19, testing positive for 14 day’s. It was brutal. One week after recovering, I then picked up my first ever running injury in over 12-13 years of running. I guess my body just wasn’t ready to run again so soon afterwards.
The injury took me out of action for almost a year. And, I’m still only just getting my running back on track now. Those two things really did a number on me.
Finally, my work related content was also split out to Irritated Sysadmin. Which, actually ended up doing quite well for a little while. I also think it’s going to remain its own entity. I’ll also publish the posts here, but having a separate location away from my other content will serve it well.
For the time being, it’s going to remain over on Substack, because dumping that kind of content into people’s inboxes is by far the best way of sharing that knowledge.
However, in the end, I decided that Substack really just wasn’t the right place for me or my personal content. And so began the look through that list once more to find the alternative.
That’s when I discovered the Blowfish theme for Hugo. It was perfection. Exactly the kind of feel I was looking for. So good, that it encouraged me to try learning a bit more about Hugo after all this time.
Blowfish
I read through the getting started multiple times before actually doing anything. And I managed to export all the content from my Ghost. Which isn’t as simple as it should be. In fact, this is by far one of the major drawbacks about Ghost. The posts aren’t in Markdown. This posts ended up being the most helpful in getting the content converted:
After dragging a few posts in and rebuilding the preview site, everything looked fantastic. So I bulk imported, and that’s when I realised this wasn’t going to work out, either. You see, not only does Ghost not store each posts in a nice simple .md. But those pretty cards for links and other things … Well, they cause Hugo to absolutely shit its pants while building.
I ended up having to remove the formatting around each card in a post to get it to go through. I didn’t fancy doing that for 150-200 posts, so that idea died, along with any remaining mojo for blogging.
Skip to now, and you’ll notice that Ghost is still running. I made the effort to revive it on my own server, get all the content re-imported, and everything was ticking along fine. I started creating some more drafts to work on.
Then came another update. A minor one. It killed it, with the site failing to start. Rollback … nope. Still failing to start. I threw in the towel again.
Recently, I discovered MagicPages.co.
It costs the same as the Nanode I was running (which I couldn’t run anything else on anyway, Ghost devoured the resources). And I don’t have to worry about any of the maintenance any more.
Slowly, my interest to start blogging again has been returning. And I’ve got a massive backlog of drafts that need working on. I also want to do a second round of #100DaystoOffload. It was doing that the first time that really got me writing and posts, and enjoying it.
Can’t believe it has been almost 5 years since I completed that. Where the hell has all that time gone.
Anyway, if you’re still following this in your RSS reader, thanks. Hopefully you’re going to start seeing utter waffle from me once again. There will be posts about all sorts. Technology, fitness, miniature painting, and the other god knows how many hobbies I have. There will also be plenty of moaning about various things. It wouldn’t be me, otherwise.