The first yearly update of the blog: how it went, what I though of it and the softwares it (still) run with,

I’m 3 weeks late but I wanted to make this post to mark the 1st anniversary of this blog.

Many of my readers speak french and probably know me from my french blog, which I opened four and a half years ago. As I grew up, my digital environment became more and more english-speaking. I have gotten better at english although I’m still lacking a lot in my writing.

On the internet, I mostly read, listen and watch english content, and interact with people in english most of the time. It did not really make sense to keep a blog in french while I was using english the rest of the time on social networks. That’s why this blog was born one year ago and so far I’m satisfied with how it turned out. I wrote 44 posts, I wish I wrote more but it’s actually not that bad, it’s nearly one post per week! Let’s say that for its second year, I’ll try to give this blog 52 posts, including this one!

I started my French blog when I was getting into Linux and FOSS. I was still in high school and I learnt a huge amount of stuff since then! It turns out that now, it’s even my part time job to manage Linux machines for web, most of the time in the Cloud ☁️.

I’m prouder of the posts I wrote on this blog because they’re more complex from a technical point of view. I stopped writing on my french blog around the time I got into my IT school and got a job. At the time, I had almost no knowledge of automation, configuration management, containers and the usual things you find in a “DevOps” environment.

My blog posts here reflect that. Here are the tutorials I’m the most proud of so far:

The last one is the most popular one since it’s well ranked on Google. By the way, I still use this stack for monitoring my personal infrastructure!

Here is an overview of the page views from my Matomo:

uBlock blocks Matomo so a lot of visits are probably missing, but it’s complete enough to see a trend. It’s growing nicely! My French blog has lots of well ranked posts so the page views are much more stable, and around two times higher, even though I don’t post anymore. I wouldn’t be surprised if my english blog surpassed my french blog by next year.

I don’t regret using Ghost instead of WordPress, at all. Sure, sometimes I miss WordPress flexibility, but Ghost requires very little maintenance and the updates are extremely easy to do. It’s fast and clean, and it’s only getting better. They made a lot of work around the editor and it’s pleasant to write in it. I don’t miss the dozens of buttons and options I had in WordPress (although I saw they made a new editor).

I’m still rocking my Casper-based custom theme. I even have a few stars on GitHub now! I still merge the upstream when they release an update in order to keep up with Ghost’s new features. And I still make changes when I think it is needed, and fixes when an update breaks a little something, which happen rarely.

Isso is still used for the comments. I’m not completely fond of it, but I did not find a better software to replace it with. It just works. While the original developer does not really work on Isso anymore, it seems other maintainers have stepped up, and we even got a release a few months ago (with an admin interface!).

Overall I have to worry less about the tools and more about the content which is great.

That’s probably all I had to say for this yearly update. See you soon in other blog posts, and see you next year!