My first blog post
... or even better, this is me not procrastinating and making excuses for publishing content and sharing my experience.
Summary
I chose Ghost as the platform for my blog because it's awesome. It's easy enough to use when I'm lazy and want to write something, and it also has a ton of features when and if I want to implement various technical bits and pieces. Some of the alternatives which I previously considered include:
- GitHub Pages: When I looked at this a while back, A records were not supported. I've read about it in this article, however, as of February 2020, apparently apex domains are supported
- Jekyll + Digital Ocean: I did not go this route because apart from deploying Jekyll, there is also some due diligence on managing the droplet itself.
- WordPress: Yeah right...
The Long Story
It's been quite a long time since I wanted to start writing about security and all kind of small projects that I'm up to. Having experimented with GitHub Pages as well as basic website builders there were a couple of limitations.
GitHub Pages
This seemed like a nice idea, and I think it's still is worth playing around with it. Based on an article which I found, from a while back, the problem at the time was that GitHub pagess : https://gon.to/2015/03/03/f-percent-number-ck-github-pages-for-jekyll-why-i-decided-to-use-digital-ocean/
Jekyll
I totally endorse Jekyll as a static site generator, it's very easy to get started with and the getting started documentation provides a solid baseline for anyone with pretty basic coding skills. Even though it's based on Ruby, you don't need to be a Ruby developer to make use of it.
Jekyll covers the content and templates, hosting infrastructure is the second requirement, one option is described above by using GitHub to store the content of the blog. The second option is to use something like Digital Ocean for hosting; the cheapest option is around $5 a month. Even better, there are excellent guides available on setting up Jekyll with Digital Ocean.
