Publishing on Ghost

I think ghost.org is marketed as medium but with branding and integrations. It's all open source and is used by quite a number of large names. I am skeptical about their business model; bigger brands aren't going to go with the paas option and wix/squarespace is so much better for smaller brands. All the big companies write their own bespoke themes, all the ones available are really shitty (sorry in advance if this blog looks like trash). For my use case, it's somewhere to take notes, with the potential of having superuser/integration capabilities (e.g. email, stripe payment, writing remotely, etc).

I decided to go with the self-host option to save something like 25 dollars. It was just also super simple to set up; there's a 1-click app on the digitalocean marketplace that does the deployment for you. I bought a domain on google (bwang.io) and added the A - Record subdomain (blog.bwang.io) to the IP address that ghost provided. I really didn't know it was that easy to create a subdomain on any domain provider.

What are nameservers? A good read.

Lastly, I added the iA writer integration so I really can just have everything offline. Also, I never really have to be distracted by all the bells and whistles ghost gives you. And that's my entire setup for this.

An aside: I forgot where first, it might have been Peter Thiel or this article on a16z, but it seems like all companies are going to end up being big tech companies. When you look at how value is going to be generated in the future and the scaling patterns that successful companies take, all these patterns are all inherent properties of software: networking effects, scalable to bigger audiences, always adapting, etc. Whatever it is, I just think it's a good habit to start self-hosting things that you build yourself.

I enjoy trying and learning new things. Each blog post we will try to make something or learn something (or both). One step of becoming a wizard is to do experiments, and one way to take advantage of missed opportunities is to do more things and tell people.