A whole new blog!
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Hello! If you ever saw the first iteration of my blog (for now, archived at blog.justaregularnerd.online) you might've wondered why I never made any further posts on there.
A Brief Technical Background
In peeling the curtain back a little bit, the previous blog used Publii, which is an amazing offline website builder. However, I quickly found that it was far from an ideal workflow for me as you had to replicate the setup on any computer you do the blog on; I have many computers that I work from for different reasons, and my installations move around quite frequently, so only after a few months it already became impossible for me to update the blog.
I also was never quite happy with how I'm not hosting the blog myself, it would be initially published to my Gitea repository, which would be replicated by GitLab to then finally be published online with a website host that pulled from GitLab (as they didn't support custom Git repositories).
The new system [Ghost] is (for now) hosted on my personal server and then published to the world via Cloudflare. This will probably mean more downtime, but I have more control over it and how everything goes, so I think this is a worthy tradeoff.
Ghost also allows for much more versatile customisation of the theme (something that I compromised on with Publii), it has a decent online web editor and it's quite lightweight on my server (which will likely be moved to a 1GB VPS in the future anyway). It will also allow for comments and email subscriptions, something that was completely absent from the Publii system.
What does this mean going forward?
The immediate goal will be to replicate functionality of the old blog here and thus work out all the bugs that should hopefully be resolved by the time you're looking at this. This will allow me to post much more freely, and I have many more adventures to share here soon.
The longer term plan will be to make this blog interactive with comments and email subscriptions. Ghost gives options for paid subscriptions, but I have no plans for this currently - I'd like this blog's content to be available for anyone. For those who don't want to sign up, I intend to set up an RSS (Atom) feed for them.
I may also allow friends and family to also post on here if occasion arises, as I'm sure their adventures would also be interesting to anyone following this blog.
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