In Part 1, I detailed how I used Hugo to get this blog up and running. "But, norb," I hear you saying in your head, "this very clearly is Powered by Ghost as it says right at the bottom of every page. You goddamn liar!"
I hear that, and in the end I decided to switch gears for one reason: I'm lazy. I spent some time trying to get Hugo set up in a better way to just be a nice blogging platform. I do believe it's probably trivial for a web developer to do it, but I am not that - see my stupid history in Part 1 if you want to know more about my background.
Here's what I wanted in my blog:
- Easy to use.
- Limited formatting options.
- Ability to get from writing to posting quickly.
- A "Tags" page that would list out all tags as an easy way to navigate by topic.
- Easy to deploy.
- Simple configuration options.
- RSS out of the box.
- Other things I can't think of right now.
After futzing around with Hugo for couple weeks, I went back to the drawing board. I started looking for blog specific software. Ghost is popular and I'd heard of it before. It's the non-nazi version of Substack. It lets me self host. It was a few clicks to get the DigitalOcean Droplet spun up. An hour-ish to get this fully configured and secured to the best of my ability (please don't hack me). I tried ONE other theme, and then went back to Casper (as an aside - I do appreciate some nerd humor... Ghost... Casper... GET IT?) and it just works.
So what comes next? Posts I hope! I wanted to get this up and running just to have something to do. Somewhere to put ideas. Some void to shout into.
I'm not going to have comments. I don't want to deal with moderating them, and honestly it'll be all spam and bots because I don't intend on advertising or really pushing this out at all. It's mostly just for me.
I do want to get the email stuff working, so I'll dig into that later, but for now, here it is.
Also, I apologize for using AI to generate some of the images. If you look close, it should be pretty obvious where I used it.
That said, if you want to get in touch I'm available via email: norb@norbz.org