In my recent post about Street Photography in South Korea, I embedded many high-res pictures. The total size of the page is about 40 MB, which is a bit much to load right away.

After my recent relooking, I finally took the time to add syntax highlighting for code snippets.

While Ghost doesn’t support code syntax highlighting out the box, it lays down the groundwork for it.

Following my recent design revamp, I took the opportunity to do another major change: migrate my blog to a new domain name. If you’re reading this you’re probably not coming from a search engine and probably know me and my work at least little. I started blogging in 2014 when I was still in high school. At that time, I was writing in french on angristan.fr. Two years ago, I decided to be more coherent with the fact that English is ubiquitous in my life and moved here to write in English.

Two years ago, when I introduced my custom theme, I said I was still considering using another theme. I didn’t find anything that fit my taste for a while, but the time has finally come! As a refresher, since I started this blog I have been running my fork of the default Ghost theme. It is open-source an available on GitHub. The default theme is great and well maintained. Since 2018, the theme has evolved quite a lot, so I updated the original post with an addition screenshot I took yesterday, if you’re curious.

As of now, I am still running my custom Ghost theme, although I plan on changing it soon. (Edit: I did). It’s open-source and available on GitHub at angristan/Casper-XYZ. I update it regularly and keep it synced with the original Casper theme. A few months ago, the Ghost team came up with action-deploy-theme, an GitHub action to deploy a theme to a Ghost website automatically, right from GitHub! I have been enjoying it for a while now, so let me share how it works.

I’ve never used date in my blog posts URLs because I thought it looked nicer and was better for SEO. Recently, I changed my mind and I find it better to have the date in the permalink. Not necessarily as precise as to put the day, but as least the year and month. What I want to achieve is this: https://angristan.xyz/understand-k8s/ -> https://angristan.xyz/2020/01/understand-k8s/ Ghost once had a toggle in the settings to enable dated permalinks, but it’s gone now and it’s off by default.

I’ve been using Ghost with SQLite for a year and a half and I haven’t had any issues related to SQLite at all. I would even say this is a very good choice for Ghost and I realize now that I’ve made a post about it. I want to switch back to MySQL because I feel more confident using it. Especially for backups. My current setup is a LXD host server with a bunch of containers managed by Ansible.

Ever since I started this blog I have been using Nginx as a reverse proxy for Ghost. Ghost is in a kind of weird place between real static and headless CMS like Hugo or Jekyll and fully-fledged CMS like WordPress. Ghost is a Node.js program based on Express that binds to a port and listen to HTTP requests, so it’s not deployable like a static website with only static files.

In my first post I said I installed Ghost with ghost-cli, the classic way. I did also say that I wanted to run it in Docker but that I didn’t know Docker enough to do it. In fact, I tried to set up Ghost in Docker a few times while being bored at school, but I didn’t succeed, so it ended up like it is now. For the past week though, I’ve been learning and using Docker a lot, and finally moved a dozen services into containers.

In my first post, I said that I set up my Ghost blog with a MySQL database. Why is that? Because ghost-cli wants you to use a MySQL database and I happened to have a MariaDB server on my VM and so I just added another database to it SQLite is a better choice However, Ghost supports SQlite as a storage backend. In fact, SQLite can handle more load than this blog could ever have, considering I use Nginx cache on my reverse proxy.