I’m actually not a tutorial/guide writer. But thought about writing this post anyways; for non-techies, so that you guys can run a Ghost Blog on AWS with Nginx reverse proxy (you obviously know that Ghost runs on Node.js), MariaDB and Let’s Encrypt.
First things first. Lets start about when I started this blog and why…
- When: Late 2011, I don’t remember the exact date. I can obviously go to Airmail (the email client I’ve been using for a long time; on macOS, iOS, even watchOS), search for ‘name.com‘ and find out the exact date and time. But not feeling like it…
- Why: I have no friggin idea…
I started it on WordPress. It took me at least 3 months to build a theme (I was still studying back then). I named it ‘iBlog’, which indeed is a beautiful blog theme. I’ll open source it soon enough…
Now, why ditch WordPress for Ghost, right?
In my honest opinion, WordPress is bloated af. A lot of people are tired of it’s loading time (which can be fixed by buying some paid plugins), a shitload of plugins needed to be installed (a plugin for this, a plugin for that, plugins for every functionality), an unprofessional back-end admin panel (wp-admin obviously) and a lot more stuff. Whereas, Ghost basically is a blogging platform with a faster, cleaner, and more appealing publishing experience. Most importantly, it’s written in Node.js (not PHP) and I friggin love Node.js…
Those are some of my reasons for dumping WordPress and I just love Ghost…
One tragedy after another
You don’t need to read this part if you only want to read technical stuff. But if you want to know the full story, go on then, who’s stopping you?
I had a bike accident a couple of years ago. The right part of my skull and my right eye popped out. Got banged up pretty hard, right? I was senseless for 3 months maybe and had issues with my right eye for another 3-4 months. My domain got expired meanwhile. I did buy it back as soon as I was feeling better. My DNS is hosted elsewhere, so everything was good. I didn’t have any automatic backup system running, so I had to backup manually. I did keep a backup locally. But the SSD and the processor of my MacBook Pro died. Instead of replacing the logic board, I bought a new MacBook Pro instead, 16 inch one this time. But my WordPress backup was gone. All I had were some posts saved in Evernote and some movie reviews I wrote in IMDB. After installing Ghost, I built a Ghost theme and manually copy-pasted those posts here.
I lost access to 1,000 posts at least. Feels bad, right? You have no idea how does it feel.
Okay, enough with my personal shit. Let’s get to learn, what we came to learn here…