Switching blogging platforms

If you are reading this, you may have noticed that there's a new look and feel to the site. I've moved from my self-hosted WordPress platform to a managed Ghost blog. There at several authors which I respect who have made the same change, and I am doing so for the same reasons as them. Specifically:

  1. Managed updates of the platform, both security and functionality
  2. The cost difference is insignificant for the volumes of traffic I receive
  3. Free up my time for other things

Items 1 and 3 are closely linked. If I'm not having to so end time performing upgrades on the server and platform, then I have more time to do other things. Things which are more interesting to me (though I do enjoy tinkering with servers), and things which will let me blog more about those things. Having recently changed jobs and moving back into development, I have a renewed interest in the technical and the problems posed by it. I have more time to look into those aspects, when I'm not updating servers.

My old site was run on Digital Ocean servers, and I still use them to test out some things, but the cost was around $20 a month. Entry level Ghost is only $29 and takes the hassle out of config and backup for me, which is ideal as my home server is close to death. I will be getting a new one, and am hoping the disks are fine, and it's just the network card and motherboard which are dying - they are about 10 years old!

The revived interest in investigating and playing with other technical topics means I am going to run into issues. Issues which others are likely to have run into, or will do in future. I could wait for the StackOverflow question relating to it, or create a resource myself before the question is asked. I plan on doing the latter, and then hopefully mopping up the former.

In terms of my old posts, I'm in the process of copying those over (there is no import into Ghost from WordPress at the moment), or the ones which are worth it. I won't be copying ones where they are just security announcement updates from different CMS systems, as they have their own routes. Also, some posts related to development on the blog when I was writing the platform myself will be left out. If you are bored enough to read those, head over to the web archives and pick them up.

Ghost may not be for everyone, and there's some features I had in my WordPress blog which I am going to miss here, specifically formatting for code snippets. For front-end development, that's going to be covered (in the short term at least) by CodePen snippets, but I am looking at others for back-end code so it can have syntax highlighting to help understanding and improve readability.