Chapter 1: Let's make a blog
So I finally have gotten my blog up and running, and, cop out though it might be, I'm going to call this my first "try" for 2016. See, though I have a strong technology background, I've never used either DigitalOcean or Ghost, so there was a bit of a learning curve there that made this particular endeavor non-trivial.
Hold on... what?
So I should probably add context to what it took to actually get this blog up and running, and why I chose this route.
This blog is built on the ghost blogging platform and hosted on a DigitalOcean droplet. I didn't want to make just another Wordpress blog (the hipster technologist in me curdled a bit at the thought of putting together a Wordpress theme for fun as opposed to for profit...) so I decided to dig up what all the cool kids were saying (which obviously, invariably, led me to NextWeb) and I began to weight the pros and cons.
My list looked a little like this:
Wordpress
Pros: HAHAHAHAHAHA
Cons: yeah...SquareSpace
Pros: Really easy to use!
Cons: Maybe a little too easy? Plus, it costs money =(Ghost
Pros: This... this has it all! Self hosted instances! Fully customizable moustache API! Asset management! Woohoo!
Cons: ...No idea how to moustache.js.
So, naturally, ghost won what with it's nerd appeal and awesome features. Ghost gives you the option to host a blog through their site (I'm fairly certain trieseverything.ghost.io exists), and, for 5$ a month (the Pro option), you can have a fully managed and customizable (e.g. theme-able) Ghost blog. Now, I personally like to do things the hard way, so instead of taking the easy route, I decided to try to host Ghost on my own VPS (justifying it by repeating "What would Alan Turing do" whilst snacking on powdered sugar munchkins). I generally use DreamHost as my hosting provider of choice, but after doing some research (AKA googling "ghost blog VPS install management") I learned that DigitalOcean has a one-click Ghost install... and the fact that I also happened to find a coupon code for 10$ pretty much sealed the deal for me.
Long story short, I did the one-click install, set up my domain name (still trying to figure out the 301 redirect by the way) and had a shiny new instance of Ghost running! Then came the fun part - the stark realization that moustache.js is actually not that much like angular. I dug deep into my past projects and happened across something I'd written using handlebars.js (it was for a previous job for a confidential client, and so unfortunately I can't show it off), and leveraged that to get a very basic understanding of what was going on. Easy right?...
So after furiously going to town on my powdered sugar munchkins (curse those delicious, tantalizing little balls of delight) and trying to create a Ghost theme from scratch (failing miserably, with many a comedic expression), I decided... to go against everything I stand for and buy a theme.
You see, I heard the song "anything you can do I can do better" from my sister when I was about 6 years old, and I took that message to heart. To this day, I always try to do/make something myself before I go out and buy it (I even went through a phase where I was convinced I could have a legendary art collection by simply replicating famous works before I learned that I am not, in fact, Neil from White Collar). Needless to say, buying a theme felt like failure... until I realized I could make it better! So I cued the music, went into the lab, and mad science'd together a Frankenstein'd monstrosity of a theme that I dubbed "Stanley" (which I think looks pretty damned good).
So, here I am - wrapping up my first post, getting ready to film my video intro in Philadelphia and Manhattan tomorrow (it's going to be a busy day), and all in all feeling slightly underwhelmed by the way this blog is coming out (I'd expected to have a following of 10,000 before I published my first post).
So, stay tuned for hilarious (videographic) forays into the worlds of art, technology, extreme sports, etc... And watch an incredibly average Joe Everyman try his hand at... well, everything.
And for your viewing enjoyment - one of my favorite youtube videos.
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