This blog has run a lot of different software. It started as a microblog written in Perl, then I switched to Movable Type, then Wordpress, and now I’ve been running Ghost for a while now on this blog, I think more than two years, after dropped Wordpress, because I was constantly fighting to keep it secure and to keep from being hacked. Ghost has been begging me to update, so it was time to re-imagine things here.
Home Server
My home server, which is hosted on a business class internet feed, runs a few “production databases” for “off site” data backup. It’s running MariaDB, and basically backs up some production data for testing, and redundacy purposes. It can go down, and it’s not super critical, but I decided a while ago to run my Ghost install in a container, on my home server, but using the MariaDB for the database, since I have a few hundred posts, it would be very light.
Lately, Ghost has been warning me that in the next update, I’ll need to be on MySQL 8 mainstream. This has been causing a lot of questions in my mind, since I can’t easily migrate all my “production” data, nor do I want to, so, I had to split it out.
Options:
- Move my Ghost install to a Raspberry Pi, or another desktop, or run two DBs on my server.
- Move my Ghost install to a cloud host for $6/mo (but its “free” right now)
- Move to Ghost hosting, $9/mo.
- Migrate to something a little less complicated. Ghost runs on Node, and is pretty strict with how it’s setup.
So I decided, I’d migrate everything to Hugo, and just have a static site, it’s way faster, way more secure, and much easier to maintain. The only downside, is the nice editor, I’m writing this in Vim, but, I guess it’s all markdown anyways, which I’m comfortable with.
Conclusion
It ended up being a lot of time to do the migration, mainly because of the migration from HTML to markdown, I used a script to convert it called ghostToHugo, which was about 90% good, I still had to manually convert some of the posts, which ended up being about 25 posts edited, but overall it went pretty well. I maybe spent 4 hours total, and now I have a new blog software!
We’ll see how it goes. I like it being more simple, and even with 325 static files, 559 pages, it builds in 336ms on my desktop, and I just rsync the changes to my cloud host instance, which I was already paying for, hosting several static sites already.
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