A while back, I dropped Wordpress as my blogging platform in favor of Ghost. At the time I was looking for something simpler to manage than Wordpress, and something new to play with. Ghost seemed like a pretty good candidate -- it is still kind of the new hotness. Node.js seemed like a potential interesting new thing to learn. So I went for it.
I should temper everything I'm about to say with the caveat that all of my complaints about Ghost are 100% my issues. I'm sure that for someone versed in Node.js it is perfectly stable. I'm sure that for someone using a hosted Ghost instance, it is a pleasure to use. As a guy who (as it turns out) is not terribly interested in Node.js and who wants to host my own blog, Ghost didn't work for me. Not being a Node guy, I don't have the first clue about how to troubleshoot it when it crashes -- and it crashes on me a lot. I don't even really know how to check the logs for it. I followed the installation instructions on the site as close as I could and I'm running a fairly stock Ubuntu 14.04 installation at Digital Ocean. I haven't done a great job at keeping track, but I know that it hasn't made it a month without a crash -- and this is a site that no one actually ever visits.
Tesla was the man ....
Listening to a podcast one day (either Linux Action Show or Linux Unplugged) I heard one of the guys in the mumble room mention that they use Nikola for the Ubuntu Mate site. As he was describing it, it sounded like it was running about my speed. I really like the idea of running a static site again -- easy to keep running, easy to troubleshoot.
To that end, this is my first post with Nikola. I plan to start using it right away. I do have a fair amount of content still in ghost, but I have all of the exported to a giant JSON file full of markdown. Since I wrote a lot of it for work (I used those articles to document a complex problem), I want to make sure I keep it around.
My plan is to migrate the old articles one by one in the reverse order that I wrote them in. If you are reading this and looking for something, let me start with a hearty thanks! Drop me an e-mail and I will bump your request up in the queue. I'm going to shoot for doing about 2 a month, and I hope to be able to add new articles at about the same rate.