It's been a while since I last published anything... and it certainly wasn't for the lack of content or ideas. I dropped the habit after my server went up in flames and just haven't picked it up since.
Well, it just so happens I suddenly have plenty of time on my hands, which seems like a great opportunity to get back on the train. Consistency is key, so I hereby vow to publish something every day for the next 30 days - and hopefully more after that.
To help me with this, I'm moving over to Ghost. I've historically used it before migrating to a headless WordPress setup with a custom React frontend with Server Side Rendering. And for all the things WordPress does right, and there's quite a few, the writing experience has never been my favorite. It would've been easy enough to just migrate my frontend to Ghost - in fact, I've already done it - but to be completely honest, there are some drawbacks to hosting a fairly unique setup like that:
- Community interactions are complex - relatively to displaying a post - and rolling my own comments system is not something I'm into. There are third party solutions, which cost time or money, sometimes both. And they still come with their own set of limitations.
- Hosting. Setting up a server is one thing, but once you start looking at sending emails, CDNs, backups and replication, it adds up really quickly. And then you want something to monitor it all.
- And let's not forget about regular updates of everything! Even having everything automated with Ansible, that's still time I need to take to check the versions and run the thing.
With that, on the small scale I operate at, I'm more than happy to drop $25/month on a world-class solution, and focus solely on the content for a little while.