Moved again

I moved my blog.

Again.

Seems like I put in so much more time towards testing new platforms, migrating my stuff than actually blogging. Hopefully this eventually changes, let’s see, but now I thought I’ll share my current setup because I think someone may find it useful. So. I used to host this site on ghost.io, which was great. Nothing against it, it worked fast, had nearly no downtime, but It’s 9 USD per month plan was somewhat limiting to me with only a handful of themes, basic integrations and little customizability. Next plan up is substantially more expensive at 29 USD / month and that triggered me to start looking at potential alternatives.

One obvious route would be to self-host ghost as it’s an open source project however I felt urge to try something different (remember how I spend way too much time on tools and not blogging?). After checking out a few options I decided to give Jekyll a try and shortly landed on a setup I wanted to migrate over and hope it sticks for a longer while. Curious of reasons? Here we go:

  1. Simplicity of blogging - now I get to blog in VS Code which is a much more comfortable environment than any WYSIWYG editor or CMS
  2. Version control & CI/CD - I have a whole blog content under git repository and a neat deployment process that automates the whole publishing process
  3. Firebase - I’ve been in love with Firebase for quite a while now (ever since Parse was killed by Facebook), so it’s a good opportunity to eat even more of my dog food. I host the site for nearly free, it’s got a great CDN, simple deployment process and several
  4. Ruby - remember Ruby? I never spent much time with Ruby however I recall every time I had it’s been a very pleasurable experience (something I’ve been recently lacking honestly but that’s a topic for another post). Picking Jekyll I’m also hopeful to spend some time tweaking and extending it.
  5. Performance - I remember when I had a few encounters with Wordpress which required tons and tons of work, plugins and tweaks to get a performance that didn’t suck, and then you got hacked because one of the optimizing plugins had a vulnerability in it. Static site that Jekyll produces that’s served by Firebase gets consistent score in high nineties of Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

So that’s that. I encourage you to procrastinate less than me trying to write blog posts, but keep playing and goofing around with new tech.