(Another) shiny new site!

It turns out that after all the hassle of setting this up, Jekyll wasn't really working for me.

I got obsessed with trying to find plugins to do things I wanted, like automatically resizing images to sensible sizes, or serve nice crisp "retina" images. I got annoyed with Git. I got caught out by Jekyll and Ruby updates. I wanted to start posts on a mobile or tablet then edit them on my laptop. I tried to move to Cloudflare Pages to work around some of the GitHub pages restrictions. All of this stuff is fixable, given time and understanding a platform I didn't care about that much, but none of it was actually writing.

At the same time, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to support "big tech": The USA is undergoing some, erm, radical shifts, and in general, the "increased investor returns at any cost" aspects of late-stage capitalism are bothering me. I wanted something more focused on creating things, and also something hosted in Europe.

A very good friend of mine, Anže, has used Ghost for years, and often encouraged me to get off my "serverless-only" high horse and just get some sort of virtual server so that I can enjoy the benefits of a real computer. As with so many things, he was right.

So, I've done that. Ashley and I share this machine, hosted by the brilliant, patient, competent people at Mythic Beasts. You should use them for hosting: their pricing is fair and they're an actual, honest business that isn't VC-backed, indebted to the hilt, or making mad loss-leaders in the hope of capturing mythical enterprise business.

It has been a long, long time since I did any Linux system administration, so I'm gradually documenting the hosting setup over at Advanced Rubbish Co (the sort of "umbrella" I use for this stuff). It's been interesting to learning about how containers work outside of the managed enterprise cloud world, and how worryingly basic support for things like secrets management is until you step into things like Kubernetes.

Importantly for me, the CMS in Ghost just works and does the right thing in almost all situations I care about. I can type, I can drag pictures in and the right things happen. I can add tags. Audio even seems to work. Posts appear, in the right order, and the site is super simple to customise and add to.

I'm not 100% sold on the current theme and layout just yet: particularly, I don't love the giant subscribe now call-to-action stuff all over the place (and I'll tone that down asap), but it's a big step in the right direction. It's certainly not all perfect, but I'm finally enjoying typing stuff up again.

You'll see more here soon.