Tech Roads Site Launch
Why not roll up a blog on a light framework like Ghost, to start dumping some of my tech adventures and insights for the benefit of the greater blogiverse?
For quite some time I've been meaning to get into a tech blog. Having dabbled with blogging in many forms motivation has come along in the form of trying to preserve a very old site, build commenced in 2002. 2002! In web terms, that's ancient. Older than Facebook, older than Google, or Google search at least.
Like many times before, I found myself hacking away for a few hours here and there, attempting to replatform this PHP based site from an archaic and expensive web hoster onto a more modern containerised platform. As always on the road to resolution, there is a lot of investigation and web searches involved, trying to overcome one hump after another, with one very specific combination of tech problems after another. So I figure with no specific financial motivation - I hear you can make a fortune if your blog gets lots of traffic - ROFL - and as I already have one or two cloud hosted servers, why not roll up a blog on a light framework like Ghost, to start dumping some of my tech adventures and insights for the benefit of the greater blogiverse?
Why Ghost?
After spending a lot of time with Wordpress (a LOT of time) trying to maintain all sorts of blogs, directories and applications, I've done my dash with bloatware, really.
I have also had a go at blogging with Jekyll, editing raw files with markdown, and serving up out of S3 and cloudfront. The end result is pretty snappy, but the UX is not great. Because there isn't one.
I did check out Ghost back when it was first launched, and I'm pleased to say it's come along a long way since then, and V2 is pretty slick. Whether the long term test stands up remains to be seen. Having said that, these days I am not so worried if the SEO is not perfect, the social media integration needs work, or there isn't a built in search. My main motivation is a tech dump of my experiences in the world of tech. Words on the page with minimal CMS management!
I do also have some selfish motivation, as I would like somewhere to store all of this ongoing tech collateral so I can refer back to it in future.
Naming the blog
Having amassed a bunch of domains over the years, the first thing I do is scan through them. I do have some juicy ones available, but I happen to find it fun to play "hunt the domain" and see what's out there in the overcooked .com and .org universe. I found a few contenders but in the end I am settling on "TechRoads.org". It's reasonably catchy but more importantly it does align with what I what to put down here. Following a tech road to reach an objective, and writing about it.
I did once release something under pseudonym on medium.com that enjoys some relatively sucessful attention, and I did consider just putting this into Medium, but after following some of the misadventures of Hackernoon, I'm going to avoid adding more content there, they are not playing nice and don't deserve it.
Hosting the blog
The first draft of this blog launched on a Digital Ocean Ubuntu 18.04 droplet hosted out of NYC. I find their $5 server with 1GB memory is hard to beat. However, when I took a look at what AWS had been doing with Lightsail, I could not resist and made the switch. Obviously they don't like that hosters like DO were having success and needed a way to compete. The 2TB egress traffic allowed under the $5 Lightsail deal is a very different model from straight up EC2, where the same traffic would cost in excess of $150 a month.
It's my first "production" dockerised site, in a combination of Traefik and the Ghost Alpine version. More on all of these things to come!
Whilst not looking to repel too many people, I reserve the right to add an occasional Giphy here and there. Enjoy the site!
"Launch" main photo by Kurt Cotoaga on Unsplash