Category: Blogging

  • My time with Ghost is at an end…for now!

    My time with Ghost is at an end…for now!

    I have to be very clear from the outset, that I am not referencing the Ghost devices that were seized as part of a multinational raid, but rather the Ghost blogging software.

    I switched to Ghost for a 2nd time back in March 2021 after they released Version 4 and I have been using it quite a bit between then and now.
    I just wanted a simple way to blog without having to deal with plugins. The editor was quite powerful and it was a great experience,

    So why did I change?

    In the more recent updates, Ghost has been adding features to the editor that would help with linking posts to old post and edit images directly on the website. But I couldn’t. The linking of old posts feature was breaking with no helpful warning, so I hoped that the next versions would help [They didn’t] and their image editing tools were made available for free for Ghost Pro subscribers but not for people that are self-hosting.

    And that is another thing… Ghost really don’t want you self-hosting the software for Production. They do not provide support for self-hosting installs, and that is a disappointing factor that I had to deal with, and was the ultimate reason for changing.

    So here I am. Back on WordPress.

    I did ask on Mastodon if there were alternatives to try out.

    I really wanted to try WriteFreely, but no matter what I did… I couldn’t get it to work at all. I probably didn’t have any patience to troubleshoot it. I will revisit this one day and try and get it working.

    I was advised to check out ClassicPress. While it is cool in theory and would probably work for certain setups, it was not for me. Thankfully, I was able to convert the work that I did on ClassicPress to WordPress via a Manual Update and everything has been working great.

    I am not a fan of Gutenberg, but I put some time and effort in and managed to re-create the home page and the posts pages to be very similar to my Ghost site.

    padraig.blog on Ghost
    padraig.blog on WordPress

    You may see references to “signing up for a newsletter”. No one signed up. And that’s OK.
    This blog is a hobby and I do not rely on it to pay my bills at the end of the day!

    I am using 8 plugins on this WordPress site, and at the moment, I wouldn’t need any more to (mostly) re-create the experience that I had in Ghost.

    • ActivityPub – This one was given. While Ghost are actively working on ActivityPub, (which I appreciate), I have my fears that it would only be available to their Pro users and will provide Zero support to people on self-hosting.
      • You can now follow this blog, either put the URL for this site, or @padraig@padraig.blog into the search of your Fediverse client, and you can see when I release a new blog post!
    • Connect Matomo – This is for website analytics. I switched from Google Analytics to a self-hosted Matomo install in 2022. This was done when I no longer wanted to be shackled into Google’s ecosystem.
    • Instant Images – I love Unsplash and I have used them quite extensively on this blog over the years and I do not plan on changing this. It also has support for Openverse, Pixabay and Pexels.
    • Shortcorder – I used ‘Snippets’ in Ghost which was like canned text. It is used for the footer of my posts.
    • Spectra – This is a plugin that gives you access to more blocks for Gutenberg. It is mainly used on the home page for the posts layout. I try to use WordPress’ own blocks where possible.
    • WP Dark Mode – If users want it, there is a 🌙moon at the bottom of the page that will switch it to a Dark Mode.
    • Redis Object Cache & WP Super Cache – For object and page caching, respectively.

    The new WordPress site is only a few days old, and I am still tweaking it to my liking!

    If you have suggestions on how I can improve the look, feel, functionality of the site, please let me know on the Fediverse.

  • Changing my Digital Mindset going into 2023.

    Changing my Digital Mindset going into 2023.

    The last couple of months within the social media industry has been wild, to say the least.

    Whether it’s Elon Musk buying Twitter for $44 billion and subsequently changing the platform, or people signing up for Federated services like Mastodon/Pixelfed/PeerTube, there has been a sense of bringing the internet back to how it should be.

    Once the mainstream (non-techie) audience figured out that the likes of Mastodon are: ‘Just like email… It doesn’t matter what provider they are with, they can communicate.’, things have been looking more positive in terms of growth.

    We have become sensitised to a ‘walled garden’ approach for over 15 years. Whether that is Facebook, Twitter, or even going back as far as Bebo. These are/were walled gardens that you could not have communicated with others on other platforms.

    🕸️

    The rise and adoption of AcitvityPub have been a positive for the internet!

    While Mastodon has been going since 2016, it has slowly been gaining traction. Ever since the rumblings of Elon buying Twitter were heard earlier this year, some people decided to jump to Mastodon. While some stayed, many went back to Twitter.

    When the deal was done on October 28th 2022, that is the day that Mastodon really took off. It exploded in popularity bringing servers to their knees. Many instances were locking themselves down to contain the onslaught of sign-ups. Even Mastodon.ie within the first couple of weeks experienced some hardships but with the generous community, we were able to come together to make Masotodn.ie a new home for Irish Twitter.

    This got me thinking. I want to embrace Federated services like Mastodon/Pixelfed going forward. I want to help make the Fediverse increase in popularity. And the best way to do that is to use it as much as I can and utilise it for my blog, websites and other content.

    Therefore, in 2023,  I have decided on the following:

    • Using Mastodon as my ‘replacement’ for Twitter posts.

      • Let’s be real here, we all know for the majority of people, Mastodon is not going to be the replacement for Twitter and that is something that I never want Mastodon to be. I see Mastodon (and other microblogging services) as an ‘Alternative’ to Twitter.
      • And the simple reason for that is there are journalists, companies and celebrities that either will not come over or will never be introduced to it. I, personally, am not going to completely abandon Twitter or close my account. I will be keeping it, and using it to browse content but I will not be tweeting as much if at all.

    • Use Pixelfed as much as Instagram.

      • I have not given Pixelfed a proper chance as a solution as I would post most of my content on Instagram. I am going to be making an effort in 2023 to post more on the platform. Whether that will be random food pics, drink, or whatever.

    • Learn more, deploy or sign up for new services that use the Fediverse.

      • This one is simple, I will be signing up and trying out new things this year. Some may stick, and some may not. But hopefully this time next year, I will be able to talk about products/services that have either come onto the scene or improved their existing products/services and hopefully be able to recommend them as an alternative to existing services.

    And I want to make something clear, while my focus will be on this new adventure, I want everyone to understand that everything is an alternative. That is what they should be treated as. Not replacements.

    Since Ghost (the platform that I am using for this blog) currently doesn’t have ActivityPub support, I will be spinning up a WordPress blog with an ActivityPub plugin and will be cross-posting my posts there. You can follow @padraig@w.pf.ie or searching for https://w.pf.ie/author/padraig/ [Update: September 2024, this has changed. This blog is a WordPress site now!]

  • Swap from SQLite to MySQL 8 for Ghost

    Swap from SQLite to MySQL 8 for Ghost

    Whenever Ghost released 5.0 back in May, they made a change so that Ghost no longer supports SQLite3 or MySQL 5.

    I didn’t mind running SQLite until the recent 5.9 changes on the Docker image for Ghost changed all of that. So now, if you try to run Ghost via SQLite3 on your Docker container, it will stop working.

    Obviously, if you still want your site to run, you would either need to continue to use a older version of Ghost (Eg. Anything <5.9) OR change to MySQL 8.

    Unfortunely, if you are running a modern day control panel like Plesk or cPanel, you may not be able to use MySQL 8 as it may have only been distrbuted with MariaDB. MariaDB is not supported on Ghost either. Solely Oracle’s MySQL 8.

    So if you already have MariaDB installed and you do not want to go through the hassle of going through the task of switching database engines and potentially causing issues for non-Ghost sites, then carry out the following:

    ⚠️

    You are going to be destroying your current site.

    Back it up.

    To back it up, you will want to go to https://<yoursite>/ghost/#/settings/labs and click on the ‘Export’ button to export the CSV.

    This will not export images. To do that, go to your content folder via SSH. You would have set this when you installed Plesk if you followed my guide!

    Copy this out to a folder in your home directory /home/<username>/ghost_backup

    If you have memberships, this may break some or all functions with it. I don’t have any paid members to know whether this does or not.

    🚨

    I am not an expert in Docker, npm, node.js or related technologies. What I am documenting here is what worked for me. YMMV

    This will involve creating 2 Docker containers:

    • A new Ghost docker container
    • MySQL 8 Docker container.

    We’ll quicky go through the MySQL 8 Docker set up.

    • Volume Mapping should set to /var/lib/mysql and the 2nd box should be set to /var/docker/<container_name>/mysql

      • You can put this anywhere that you like, but I advise keeping it within the /var/ directory for ease of access.

    • Uncheck the ‘Automatic Port mapping’ and you will be presented with 2 ports.

      • Port 3306 would already be used by MariaDB so change this to another port. I chose 3307.
      • Port 33060 would also be used by MariaDB so change this to 33061

    Where it has Environment Variables, add the following:

    • MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD and in the 2nd box, add in your root password. This is caps sensitive, so ensure this is strong.

    🚨

    Yes, I know using root as the username is bad practice. If I knew how to improve this, I would!

    Now with the database server created, we will need to create the database, for this, you will need to drop into the shell for this container.

    In SSH, connect to your server and ensure that you are on root user.

    • Type docker exec -it <mysql_docker_container> /bin/bash/ eg: docker exec -it mysqleight_docker /bin/bash and press enter.
    • Type mysql -p and enter in your MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD that you set earlier. Now you should see mysql >
    • Type CREATE DATABASE db_name; (Replace db_name with the new name of your database)
    • Type exit; to drop out of the MySQL shell and then Ctrl/Cmd+D to drop out of the docker container.

    Now to set up Ghost.

    Create a Ghost container as per my guide here:

    How to install Ghost 5 on Plesk Obsidian

    Sidenote: The above link should be a bookmark and look fancy and shit, but because I am using a .blog TLD, it breaks! Mental! I have already reported it to the Ghost devs but they are not looking at it. 🙄

    When you are setting the “Environment Variables”, you will need to make the following additions:

    ⚠️

    Ensure there are 2 underscores for spaces here!

    • database__client – mysql
    • database__connection__host – 123.123.123.123 (Your Server IP address)
    • database__connection__user – root
    • database__connection__password – **************
    • database__connection__database – db_name
    • database__connection__port – 3007

    Press “OK” and this will create a blank new Ghost site.

    Create your site as per normal, then go to https://<site>/ghost/#/settings/labs to import your content.

    Then copy your content folder back to /var/ghost/my_new_awesome_ghost_container/content – Restart the Ghost container and most (if not all), your posts, content, themes and everything should be back.

    You can update the Ghost container as you would have before.

Welcome to the new padraig.blog. If things feel off, please let me know on Mastodon
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