Taking stock.

Today and last night I have:

• Deleted the test mysql database and configured the production database for this blog.
• Fixed an issue with this blog not accepting my password.

I don't know what happened, but I learned how to log into Mysql and change the database password and the password to my main Ghost account as a result.

For some reason I logged in once, but couldn't log in again anywhere else.

I'll write a guide on that later.

• I also fixed something wrong with Nginx that had started giving me a 502 bad gateway.

I have no idea what caused this to happen, but somehow one of the ports in one of my ghost config files got changed, but the others weren't. I nearly nuked the box again but I'm glad this was simple to fix.

• Learned where the default Ghost instillation is

If you used the digital ocean pre-setup image, it will be under /var/www/ghost

Why the main page didn't mention that I don't know but I got pretty lost trying to find it at first. You need to change into that directory in order to run any of the ghost scripts, like ghost restart

You also need to change to the ghost user to run those commands.

• Learned how to install ghost themes and chose one for the time being.

The easiest way to try a theme out and set it up if you don't want to do any customisation is to go to the ghost themes directory on the server,

cd /var/www/ghost/content/themes and use git to clone the repository directly onto it. You need to make sure you have curl installed, and you need to use the root user, or another user with write permissions.

Once you have cloned the repository, you need to restart ghost. Switch to the ghost-mgr user, change to the ghost top-level directory, and run ghost restart

Then go back to your ghost dashboard, go to labs, and you will see a visual entry under themes. Click on that and it will be instantly activated.

• Imported my content across from my initial Micro blog.

I tried to find a way to do this automatically, but while Microblog did export to a WordPress archive format, the only way to convert that to a format Ghost accepts would be to use a WordPress blog with a business plan so you could use the official plugin. There was also a script on GitHub that only exported to a ghost 1.0 format.

The main reason I wanted to use something like that instead of cutting and pasting my content was so that I could keep all my original publish dates. I previously hadn't been able to work out how to change a publish date on a ghost post into the past, but once I did I stopped worrying about how to get this working.

I'd still like to write that script to convert WordPress exports to Ghost 2.0 format, but it's not a blocker for this week anymore. It's a clear pain I can solve, but I don't know if I can charge anything for it yet. The whole reason people want it is so they don't have to pay for a business WordPress account in order to get their data out, but there still might be opportunities that arise out of making it.

• Chosen an initial site layout.

I struggled a lot choosing an initial theme, because I wanted to have a similar experience to microblog where all your post are expanded on one page, and you can just scroll down reading all of them without having to click around a lot. Since I've made a lot of small, short posts, I though having to click to open every single one of them would be a nightmare.

I also didn't want them in reverse-chronological order, as they often relied on context mentioned just a few entries earlier.

What I decided to do instead was to aggerate my smaller posts together into big posts. I'd separate it by line breaks and put the publish time at the bottom of each entry.

Each of the bigger posts would be split up by week or a chunk of time where I completed a block of related work. This would allow the reader would still have some context for where they were up to, and they wouldn't get lost feeling like they were reading a giant book.

However, they would still get the experience of all my little posts expanded together, and it would all be in chronological order for once.

I'd also make a home page giving an overview of everything and a little table of contents with the big posts in chronological order for them too.

Final things I completed:

• Written a draft home page
• Set my profile picture and written an initial bio

2020-03-01 3:10 pm

Things I still need to do:

So I can show the first few people this blog

Create site logo. -done

Create 'table of contents' on homepage -won't do, will get out of date really fast, especially if I change the domain name

Add site tagline. -done

Add site title. -done

Finish editing and formatting content.

So I can share this blog on the internet

Create site favicon -done

Add image for site banner -won't do, not very important yet

Set up metadata properly

Remove empty Facebook  profile button

Remove 'Published with Ghost • Theme Attila' from footer

Change orange colouring in theme to something that matches one of the logo colours

Format the post preview text, so it doesn't all run in together looking unprofessional.

So I can 'Launch' it properly

Choose a 'proper' domain name.

Set up Mailgun.

Set up a mailbox for chosen domain name.

Set up a campaign manager.

Set up analytics.

So I can nuke the box without fear

A lot of times when trying to set this blog up on a DigitalOcean droplet I messed the installation up, and I would sometimes destroy and re-create the droplet to resolve it.

I don't want to have anything that lives on the droplet that isn't backed and easy for me to recreate it exactly what I've done on it in case something happens to it.

Clone chosen theme into its own git repository if I start making customisations to it.

Investigate how to host posts in a git repository.

2020-03-01 4:00 pm

Need to make a Trello board soon so I can track work a lot easier. Just wanted to hold off as long as possible so I didn't get distracted writing up cards. Considering I'm evidently using a live blogpost as a todo list right now, I think I'm pretty much at that point now.

2020-03-01 9:55 pm

Did a quick word count. I've written over 7.5k words on this blog already!

If I'm successful at meeting some of my business goals I want to turn this into an ebook.

Still not sure if there's any way to tell if the DNS for my art blog domain name has propagated over yet, but I'll have another crack at setting it up tomorrow.

2020-03-01 10:25 pm