Eccentric Developments

I've been using the Ghost blogging platform for some years now, it´s great software with a nice interface, lots of options and support. So why is it that I'm moving away from it? Well, I got some simple reasons that I'll talk about, but mostly, because I can.

Ghost is build on top of node.js, which was the main reason it got my attention; it's very easy to setup, especially if you are used to working with docker. The team behind Ghost is very commited to improving it and that's why you always get alerts about updates all the time, which is good. The only problem is that I never got to update to the latest version because I find it difficult to find the time to do that.

It's also very resource efficient, currently just using around 60MB of RAM, and it is very fast at serving pages. As node.js is a very fast platform for running web services, it makes Ghost snappy to use on top of small VMs. You can tell by the recomended specs page, that it's meant to be efficient.

So there is nothing wrong with Ghost, but anyway, I wanted to move away for it because of a simple reason: I wanted to run my blog on something that could be more easily moved from one server to another and be even more efficient. Also, I wanted this blog to run on something written by myself.

That's why I got to the task of building this platform you're reading on, right this moment. Written in Rust and using the Actix framework, this thing is very fast; it uses sqlite as storage for the content and, as such, can be moved very easily. I plan to host this on a raspberry pi zero, to see how that goes.

And also, to acompany this blog server, I also wrote a content editor, also in Rust, using the Cursive framework. Making it easy to add new or edit content from a remote terminal. It is very fast and uses very few resources.

The old blog will be hosted in old.eccentricdevelopments.com for a bit, just to be sure it no longer has any data that I haven't migrated yet; mostly images I guess, as the starting poing of this blog database was a JSON dump from my posts in Ghost.

Now I need to get a new lightweight design that also looks good...