My Blog Architecture

In this article I wanted to take a little time to explain they way my blog works, and the reasons I didn't go bespoke.

When I set out to create a blog I asked the team at work what I should use to host it. Some of the team at work have blog sites and others have spent some of their career creating sites for others, so I asked around, both at work and outside.

I got lots of suggestions and a lot of people talked about Wordpress. It's really popular and people can use it for all kinds of projects. Hosted or not it's one of the most flexible website platforms out there with a massive ecosystem of plugins, themes, & extensions.

I tend to find Wordpress too complex to be a blog and too much like a blog to be a full site CMS. At it's roots Wordpress is a blogging platform and still hasn't quite gotten away from that. I also think that it's often easy to spot a Wordpress site. They usually have a similar feel as you navigate, especially if your hosting on wordpress.com.

So doing a bit of a google search I came across Ghost and Medium as alternatives. I did seriously consider Medium, but it doesn't really let you have a brand. It all just feels like Medium and the editor isn't as intuitive as Ghost in my opinion.

Ghost has a everything you'd expect:

• Open source
• Schedule content in advance
• Powerful API
• Integrated AMP support
• Detailed structured data (Facebook Open Graph, Twitter Cards and Schema.org)
• Rapid pace of development, having gone from 0.11.3 to 2.0 since I started using it.

I discovered Ghost almost a year ago but couldn't work out where to host it. It didn't even occur to me that I should just pay for the hosted version. It was the revelation that my time was more valuable that finally clinched it.

So why not host?

A lot of people asked if I was going to host the blog my self. Given that I work in IT operations that's a pretty good question. It comes down to what's got the most value, my time or my money. With 2 kids, a full time job, and Church commitments time is in short supply so that will always win.

The fact that I work with servers and hosting every day also plays it's part though. The last thing I want to do is come home and have to think about updates, backups, capacity, and security of my blog. I run a blog to write, and publish content, not to maintain it.

I ❤️ Markdown

Life is busy and always full of distractions. From the kids to the ding of a mobile notification, or the popup from the nearest email client. When I manage to make time to write I want to focus on producing content. I don't really want to think about how that writing looks or the spacing round the picture.

This is where markdown comes in handy. It's easy to make lists, headings, and links to name a few, without lifting your hands off the keyboard. I allows for a nice consistent writing flow. You can think about your message and not about the padding, style, or spacing. I also love that you don't have to remember editor specific shortcuts. Markdown is always the same no matter what editor you're using.

Speed

We all want websites to load quickly! We're all in a hurry all the time. Back in May 2015 Microsoft announced our attention span had fallen to 8 seconds.

the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000, or around the time the mobile revolution began, to eight seconds.^[1]

As a result I decided I wanted a CDN in front of Ghost, for one it allows me to easily add SSL and other custom security features that Ghost doesn't support yet. While I decided to pay for Ghost it's self I have no desire to be spending hundereds of pounds a month hosting a site that I barely remember to write for let a lone get people to vist (yet!). Cloudflare seemed a logical choice for me given their really good free offering. I can't say I'm bothered who I share an SSL certificate with, it doesn't seem to have an impact on ranking or on the reputation of your site.

Using Cloudflare also gives me the ability to setup HSTS and http/2 at the click of a button. It also allows me to enable TLS 1.3, set a minimum TLS version. One feature I quite like is the ability to rewrite links that I forgot to make https to begin with.

To Sum Up

Hope this helps you understand my mentality and the rational behind the decision, would love to hear your comments or questions, let me know here or on twitter.