I like to ramble on as much as the next person, but up till now it's mostly been offline. To save my wife from hearing me talk about programming and tax law I'm making like it's 2004 and (re)starting a blog. Properly this time. Like with actual content and everything.

Discovering Ghost

For past blogging attempts I've used Wordpress (easy) and Jekyll (hackable) and neither were much fun. As a developer I want something that's easy and hackable and I'm hoping that the node based Ghost fits the bill.

I get to write Markdown (win) with a nice javascript-based preview window, and the posts save to an SQLite database.

Installation

wget https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-0.4.1.zip
unzip ghost-0.4.1.zip
cd ghost-0.4.1
brew update
brew install node
npm install --production
npm start

Very nice!

Hosting

I'd been hosting up to now on Github pages which to be honest has been a giant PITA (mainly because of issues with Octopress). I'm looking at moving to Heroku but in the interests of getting up and running quickly, I used buster to generate a static site from my local Ghost install.

sudo pip install buster
buster setup --gh-repo=git@github.com:xavriley/xavriley.github.com.git
buster generate --domain=http://localhost:2368
buster preview # browse localhost:9000 to check
buster add-domain xavierriley.co.uk
buster deploy

Except in my case buster deploy failed because of my existing Octopress blog in that repo. After taking a fresh clone to backup the old blog, I deployed by:

cd  static # where buster makes it's repo
git push -f origin master

which blows away the old repo and lets me deploy normally from then on.

For bonus points

To make the deploy process smoother, try running:

sudo sh -c 'echo "127.0.0.1 local.tryghost.org" >> /etc/hosts'

to be able to run buster generate with no extra args.

Conclusion

From discovering Ghost to deploying to Github pages took about 15 minutes and I didn't have any issue that held me up for more than about 10 seconds. Now I've been programming professionally for the last six years and I can honestly say that doesn't happen very often.