Moving Blog
I know it has been a while since I last posted.
It has been a busy time, but I am ready to pick things up again.
But right now, I am in the process of breaking up with WordPress as well as my current hosting provider.
There are 2 main drivers of this:
1) Speed
I just find that this site takes way too long to load. Especially when it comes to logging in and writing a post. For example today, it was a full minute (including typing user name and password which took about 8 seconds) before I was typing this out.
I think it is also unreasonably slow for those who just want to read it.
I don’t know the cause of this slowness. I suspected WordPress, but I also think it is this with a combination of the actual host. I have tried a couple of caching plugins, but they have made no difference.
2) Security Vulnerabilities
For the past few weeks, I have noticed that there was a rogue link that had appeared on the site. I looked everywhere for where this was coming from and in the end, changing the theme seemed to get rid of it.
I have been quite savvy when it comes to security on WordPress and yet this still happened.
So where am I moving to?
Blogging Platform
Ghost is a relatively new blogging platform that has received that has caused quite a stir in the blogging community.
The problem with WordPress, is that it has become a CMS. There is a lot of extra crap that I just don’t want and is slowing it down. Ghost strips all that away and gives me just a blogging platform.
It is so much faster. It takes mere seconds to log in and be on a “New Post” page. No bulky or vulnerable plugins. No admin dashboard that takes forever to load. Simple. Clean.
The editor is much better too, with preview on one side and the text on the other.
Hosting
I have been playing a lot recently with (and even hosting a project on) AWS. I love the freedom I get with having my own server that I can do what I like with and install what I want. I need this, as Ghost requires nginx and python and a bunch of other libraries to be installed.
The problem I dislike with them is the way that they do the billing. I just don’t get it! I have asked them about it a couple of times, but their response has been slightly varied.
So I thought I would try a company called Digital Ocean. They give you a server, just like AWS, with certain specs for a certain price. And that is it. I pay this fixed sum for a server that I can access and do what I like with!
But the feature that won it for me, was the fact that they had a bunch of pre-installed “images”. One of which was for Ghost! So basically, I was able to have a Ghost server up and running in about 5 minutes without having to manually install a single thing.
I don’t need all of the other things that AWS offers.
And so, that is what I am doing. If you go to antonydandrea.co.uk, you will see the progress that it is making.
As soon as I am ready and everything has been migrated, this antonydandrea.com domain will also point to that new server.
By the way, one thing I will miss is the SEO plugin.