Now, most of you will know, I did a big update for me website (linked here ) and since then, I’ve come to realise that with every blog post, I’d have to recompile the template, and ensure I updated the entire site appropriately. This, when you’re dealing with a number of pages makes for a difficult and arduous update, given I’d need to test each page, ensure that they’re behaving as they should and so on.
I briefly tried Ghost (available here ) and whilst it is a platform which could soon ‘take off’, it was restrictive in what I could do with it, namely static pages, where I would want to host a projects page with child pages below it. In Ghost, everything is a child of the root, meaning that it could never be structured how I wanted it to be. Whilst the Ghost team were very quick to respond, this project is only in its infancy and as such, I guess features such as this will be pushed back to the queue for the time being. Another issue I found was with templating – I applied the ‘Ghostion’ theme which looked crisp and provided a lot of modularity. That said, I had to write a lot of changes to allow the page to work correctly, in the style I wanted. This further reinforced the Ghost motto of
Just a Blogging Platform.
Now, maybe I was asking too much from Ghost, but the issue remained that I needed a means for putting content into one place, with a CMS at the core. I spun up another DigitalOcean VPS (why not set one up) (which was very quick!), and after my usual configurations, I was up and running.
The root server for this domain is on a Netrouting VPS, but it’s limited compared to the cost, so I am planning to migrate everything over, and use it for redundancy, but this one seems to be doing very well! I’ve even implemented the Twitter Cards feature, so that if you link to a page from Twitter, you’ll see a nice summary of the page. I built that into the Ghost platform, but I couldn’t provide a nice excerpt, nor could I change the image presented. Those were little niggles, which this seems to resolve through a few plugins. Commenting is also centralised, which I like rather than Disqus, which for some reason didn’t play ball with Ghost where the page ID wasn’t correctly being plugged in – it was presenting null values…
So – let me know what you think of this site – I’m planning on moving everything over in a few weeks to this server, and changing the domain over so rjthomas.eu will point here instead.
Share if you liked this post, comment if you want to share a view and let me know if you want something explored and discussed!
RJT
May 2014
Disclaimer:
I have to give a note of thanks to my friend Andy (blog here ) for finally winning me over to using a CMS for my site – why not have a look at his blog?