Time for an update

It has been a while since the last post. The usual excuses apply: tired, too busy, too lazy, etc. With that said a lot has happened over the last twelve months. We went on a summer vacation to Portugal last summer, followed by a tour of Italy this summer. We stopped in Mexico twice, once for a winter escape and once to celebrate with friends. I've been playing more tennis again. Our team won the USTA sectionals in Texas, and soon we will be competing at the Nationals in San Diego. I'm sure I'm forgetting many other adventures, but posts will come in due time.

To kick things off let's start with a small technical rant. I've been using Ghost to publish this site for a while now. I started with Ghost 3 and the latest version is now Ghost 6. I self-hosted Ghost on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). They offer a very generous free tier which was more than sufficient for a small Ghost site like this one. OCI was very stable and I never had any issues with loosing my free instance due to high demand by paying customers. But here is the rub, after upgrading from Ghost 3 to Ghost 4, I got a bit tired of maintaining these instance. I automated most of the Linux updates, but migrating Ghost from one version to another was becoming an adventure.

The upgrade from Ghost 3 to Ghost 4 was fairly easy. But things started getting more difficult as Ghost 5 was released. Initially I just stayed with Ghost 4 as security updates and patches were released regularly. But then the long term support (LTM) for that version ended. I considered upgrading to Ghost 5, and even started a test instance, but all things considered, this upgrading and testing was consuming too much time. It also did not help that Ghost 5 had some breaking changes and required a database migration from MariaDB to MySQL. I realize that rather than spending time on the above, I simple wanted to write some content now and then. Don't get me wrong, I still love tinkering with technical stuff, but there are more interesting things for me to explore than self-hosting Ghost.

And so I began look for fully-managed Ghost hosting platforms. The official fully-managed offering from the Ghost team itself looks good, but for a small site like mine it was a bit expensive. After a bit of research I decided to go with Magic Pages as the service provider. Service provider my be an overstatement, as the entire operation is presently run by a single guy - Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki. I had some doubts at first about a one-man operation, but after a few emails back and forth with Jannis, my concerns were put to rests quickly. He is super responsive, assisted in migrating my content from OCI, and when I had a few small issues with configuring my domain name system (DNS) he was quick to fix them. He even updated the Magic Pages configuration panel based on my experience to make it easier for future users. Site backups can be easily downloaded from the Magic Pages control panel directly within the Ghost admin console. Should I need to migrate again in the future it should be fairly easy. So far it has been smooth sailing and I should finally have more time to work on content rather than managing a server.

Don't worry, I will still tweak a few things here and there, starting with the Casper theme which I've been customizing a little to fit my specific needs. I plan to keep it in sync with the official repo. You can find the modified version here if you want to use it as well. Cheers, for now!