How I setup this blog
Ever since Ghost was released in 2013, I always wanted to self-host and try it. It wasn’t blogger or wordpress. It looked cleaner. It was more lightweight. But I never had my own server or the time (honestly) to host my own “ghost” blog.
When I moved from Azure to GCP earlier this year, I decided to do it. I finally had it up and running! It was perfect … kind of … way too perfect. I started noticing this when I turned off almost every feature on the admin panel. The only features I were using were the theme, design and code-injection section. Yup, that is all. I got so tired after all that, I didn’t even write posts. It was an overkill for what I wanted to do. I just wanted a plain blog with text. As minimal as I can possibly let myself be. And I don’t want “writing” to be a section or a task. That I when I realised that I actually do a better job at writing things down when I do it in Obsidian.
Some history
To add context, I’ve tried this many times over the last 15 years - but I was never able to “journal” or “blog” or “write” stuff consistently. Forget blogging - I couldn’t even write my own journal / diary for more than 3-4 days. I usually get excited to “set things up” and then it just gets too boring or complicated for me to stick to it and do the actual writing.
However, this year, for the first time in my life, I’ve somehow managed to actually journal pretty consistently for the last 5 months. There could be multiple reasons for this change in my behaviour - I’d like to believe it is primarily due to my improved state of mind given the recent positive life changing events in my personal life. But, some of it is definitely because of obsidian. I know it has it’s pros and cons. I am not saying it is the absolute best. But it just works for me.
So, I started thinking why I was failing to translate this new-found consistency to blogging. And that is when I decided to change my blog to work for me - rather than me changing my writing to work for my “fancy” blog. Now, before I deep-dive into how I set this blog up, I do want to callout something
I have NOTHING against ghost. It just didn’t work for me and my practices. I still think it is one of the best things to ever exist.
Finding a way to convert markdown to a blog
And of course it was like finding pizza in a mall. I had about 2,32,13,675 options and more to do this. I’ve personally already one of them 4 years ago - 11ty.