Setting up a simple blog

In trying to set up this blog, I considered many options. I have another blog at newinweb.com which uses Ghost. It is running in a Docker container, connecting to MySQL which runs in another Docker container. It took a long time to set up, but was a good learning experience. I almost did the same for this blog, but was worried it would take a long time.

Instead, I’ve opted for simplicity. From hosting websites for friends and family in the past, I have amassed a set of quite useful scripts for adminstering nginx websites. I decided that it was time to tidy them up and open source them. They are now available on my Github page.

Using the scripts, it’s possible to spin up a VPS on DigitalOcean, install nginx and get a https blog running within a few minutes. Why mess around with complexity? For the blog itself, I am using Hugo, which is a very simple tool for generating static sites from markdown files. For now, I generate the site, and upload it via SFTP. Retro, I know, but it does the job. It’s easy to get bogged down in the setting up, rather than the doing. Perhaps in the future I’ll automate this deployment, but for now, I’m happy that it works!