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The website is live!

Leon Hassan

• 2 min read

So for the past 2-3 days I've been working on getting my website up and running, which resulted in a lot of relearning and rekindling!

This all started because I'd finally gotten my Student Git pack, which might I add is wonderful and available for anyone in full time education, is over the age of 13 and has a student email address. In this pack you get various goodies eg. a Digital Ocean voucher!!

Getting Started

So I finally got round to setting up a blog using Ghost, which again is really really nice! I setup the server with Ubuntu v14.04 and nginx 1.4. After it had been set up I installed Ghost, had a play around with loads of different themes available and decided after much deliberation that it would be best for me to stick with Casper (the default theme) and then use Bootstrap to keep the blog in line with my portfolio site (which hosted for free at Hostinger!!).

This is where I set myself a little to-do list, which might I add for all others without a short-term memory, is the only way I can actually get things done!
My list was roughly as follows:

  • Upload pictures for blog cover.
  • This is actually ongoing..
  • Navigation bar (and maybe footer) update.
  • Remove built-in Ghost Navigation.
  • Mailgun (for all emails from/to this blog).
  • Encryption for Admin pages.
  • RSS button.
  • Disqus comments on blog posts.
  • Move Ghost to a Subdomain.
  • Fix all the tiny bugs currently eating my heart out!

The highlights of the list

My navbar from my website was added to Ghost (after much chagrin..) successfully! Then I started recolouring everything in my blog to stick with the very clean, white and orange thing I've had going on for a while now..

Encryption for my admin pages I did using Let's Encrypt!, a great free tool. Only downside is that your SSL certificate runs out after 3 months, but that's only a Cron Job away.

Moving Ghost to a subdomain was a bit of a pain, but that's because it's my first time using nginx and the guides I was looking at didn't mention the nginx config changes you needed to make! Eventually I found out about this after seeing a sentence for it in a guide and remembering setting up Let's Encrypt! So after a day and a bit, Ghost was successfully moved to GHOST_URL/.

Throughout all of these additions and changes I spent a lot of time trying to fix things little formatting peeves around the site (like tracking down padding: 100px being applied to everything in my CSS). But thanks to this I remembered why vim and other command-line editors are so great for web development.

What am I going to post about?

So I'm gonna start using this blog for a variety of things such as:

  • My Industrial Year updates for my personal tutor.
  • General technology stuff.
  • Fantasy book reviews.
  • Television reviews (choose a series from my Plex regularly).
  • Comic stuff (Mainly DC and Marvel)!

There will be tags setup for each of these areas. So if you find that you enjoy my blog or particular topics, you can just subscribe to that tag using RSS or by keeping an eye on the tags' URL!

My first real post is scheduled for this weekend, so keep your eyes peeled..