Setting Up My New Blog

After I decided starting this new journey, I started looking at a few blog engines, I wanted the simplest one, easy to setup and use. I've used Blogger and WordPress in the past and I really didn't want to go down that path again.

Out of the blue a tweet come out from @damovisa saying "Moving my blog to @TryGhost". I did some research and decide to go ahead with it and so far my experience has been amazing. Here's what I've done to set it all up.

Creating Blog

I went to ghost.org and created a new blog, but if you want to setup a custom domain then you have to pay for it. I think it's definitely worth it to pay for it, and that's the best option if you're not technical. But I'm really not sure what the future of my blog is, although I'll try pretty hard to keep it up.

I started looking for alternatives and found a blog post from Scott Hanselman about how to install a Ghost blog in Azure and since I've got a MSDN subscription and because of that I have a few bucks to spend on Azure, that was my best bet.

Following Scott's post was pretty straightforward, just click a button on their GitHub page and you're ready to go, it was really that easy.

Configuring Custom Domain

Setting up a custom domain wasn't too bad also, just followed the azure documentation and it was a piece of cake.

Configuring SSL

This one required some digging, not for the configuration specifically, but for the cheapest option. I don't want to pay for something that I don't know if I'll use for long. So I went back again to Damian Brady's blog to check what he was using and found out about CloudFlare.

It's free for personal websites and blogs and you can also setup 3 redirection rules, basically, if someone tries to access your website through HTTP they will be redirected to https. So far so good, no issues at all with it.

Configuring Email Service

That was a great finding. Every time I think about setting up an email service, I just think it's a pain in the ass. I had massive issues with AWS in the past to setup an SMTP server and really wasn't looking forward to having any of the similar issues. But as you follow Ghost's instructions, they recommend you to use MailGun. Which is an email API service, so no SMTP required. How awesome is that? And it's free for the first 10,000 emails of every month. To be honest, if I start sending more than 10,000 emails per month, it's time for me to start spending some money.

Configuring Comments

Alright, so every nice blog has a section to leave comments and I wasn't going to be the only one without it. Just a few weeks ago, before my annual review at SSW, they asked me if this guy was me and I was like "who the hell is this guy?", but I got over it. And once I started setting up my blog, I remembered that that site is actually to set up comments to your own website. So I've found the instructions on how to install it in a Ghost blog. Again not hard to follow.

And here I am. Done!!!