Blog Update

A while ago when I started this blog back up again, I mentioned that it was running on a Raspberry Pi 3 B. The machine was serving a static website with nginx generated by Hugo. While this worked fine there were some things about it that I was not a fan of.

The first thing that bothered me about it was that I didn’t love the absence of a proper CMS. It was fun to run commands to generate the site, but the process of editing files felt cumbersome without a web interface. I much prefer to use a more mature and widely supported CMS. Sometimes my workflow would result in lost work if an app would crash.

Second, I didn’t like that I needed to use third party comment systems. Disqus was ugly, and not that configurable and the alternatives were needlessly complicated as well as seemed to hinder my ability to moderate. It’s not like this blog is getting a ton of interaction, but I didn’t want to risk missing something heinous in the comments section of my blog that I didn’t notice because the comment system didn’t notify me.

I knew from the beginning I wanted to eventually transition this space back to Ghost, a platform I have used in the past, both self hosted and not. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money to run Ghost and wanted to keep it going through a Raspberry Pi. The problem was that my Pi 3 did not have enough memory to run Ghost without problems during the upgrade process without tuning MySQL to use fewer resources and I didn’t want to do that and find out during an upgrade I didn’t to it right. I knew to change platforms I would need to transition the blog to a Pi with more ram.

For my birthday, my boyfriend got me a rack mount for my Pi from UCTRONICS here. This is something I didn’t need, but wanted because why not? After getting my old Pi 3 installed in it (unsupported), I promptly ordered a Pi 4. When it arrived, I spent several hours trying to setup Ghost and found that I could not get it running properly.

After taking a break from the project, I decided to revisit it by running Ghost inside of Docker. While I tend to shy away from Docker, it is working now. I may again in the future try to run Ghost outside of Docker.

As for my old Pi 3? It is now serving internal DNS and ad blocking with Pi-hole and Nginx Proxy Manager.