Creating a (side)project blog

in less then five minutes 💯

Well as you can see one of the more recent projects has been the creation of a blog. We realized that very few people actually know what kind of projects we are working on. So, consequently we decided to create a new  online space to communicate about the projects we work on. Moreover, we might even decide to share some of these projects with you, our newfound audience.  As we enjoy creating proof of concepts, especially in our spare time. We ended up considering several tech stacks and headless CMS'es  before settling on Ghost.

What is the goal?

As we were contemplating creating a new website based on the core we have created for a previous projects (that we will blog about later on 😊) , we came to the conclusion that recreating this core would take too much time. Especially because we wanted to get started quickly and focus on writing instead of being drawn into coding the next website. So we decided to Google a bit before starting to code.  The goal was to create content, not to create yet another empty site.

We ended up looking for something with the features of medium. However medium would not work as I wanted to put my content on my own site.

We knew ghost from several years ago when we advised a client who wanted to create their own blog to start working with Ghost. As it was a cheap and speedy solution back then. Oddly enough when we searched for a blogging headless CMS Ghost was among the first search results. We figured to give it a spin and, voila! it suited our needs perfectly. We proceeded to install it on a spare server we have running for one of many other side projects...

Minor setback

Straight out of the gates we ran into a major problem, the modern Node version we were running was not supported by Ghost. Yet again we were about to start installing multiple Node versions on the server when we suddenly realized that in 2020, there are one-liners for these types of problems.

Solution

You spend four minutes reading this story about me creating a ghost blog while the actual solution will only take up one minute of your time. What do you need? Docker installed and the following line of code:

docker run -d --name frtn-ghost -e url=http://frtn.nl -p 2368:2368 ghost

Ok, maybe it is nice to reverse proxy this using Nginx and letsencrypt to setup a proper  SSL connection to your new blog. But the fact remains that this is mind blowingly quick to create a proof of concept blog for your projects!

Happy blogging 😊