Yet Another Ghost Attempt

Ghost looks clean and elegant compared to WordPress but with one serious hurdle, price. Hosting solutions for Ghost range from 13-16 USD per month, which is huge compared to “free” for wordpress, but also in regards to the volume of traffic our blogs get. Is it worth spending 15 CHF per month for a blog that no one reads?

Full Ghost Clone of This Blog

Two days ago I was playing with Ghost locally. I tried to export my blog to ghost via the full export tool, failed, and then tried again via the JSON tool and this time I had success. I then instantiated an instance on the laptop I’m blogging from, before importing the json file.

Many times, in the past, the JSON import failed part of the way through. This time it was a complete success. The next step was to use rsync to copy the image files from my live blog to my Ghost experiment. Within a few minutes I had another resounding success. My blog is now mirrored via Hugo, WordPress and Ghost.

Ghosted by Infomaniak

The next challenge is to get the Ghost blog to be on the open web. I spent last night and this morning trying one method after another to install Ghost on a Next.js instance without success. Following the instructions failed, so I tried installing via the more direct route, and that failed. The hurdle I faced was that Ghost couldn’t see the DB, but also that the DB couldn’t be populated due to a time out. That’s when I gave up.

The Simple Solution

There is a really simple solution. I have a spare Raspberry Pi or two, currently dormant. If I install docker and instantiate Ghost, and then put that Pi in the router’s DMZ, then I have a Ghost blog for “free” that takes minutes to setup. Aside from electricity, if you already have that Pi, then the cost is low, until you start getting traffic.

If I did this I would isolate this machine from the internal network, and ensure that it checks for updates daily.

And Finally

Whilst it would be nice to play with Ghost rather than Wordpress Hugo already fills the niche of being light and quick to use, especially since I switched to rsync from ftp file transfers. Now, when a blog post is ready, it takes seconds to update new files.