Post started Wednesday, April 28th, 2021.
On Tuesday, April 27th, I managed to get my Ghost instance up. It was a pain.
…but only because of my stupidity. Let me explain.
The Install Chaos
I started installing Ghost that morning, my time. I figured it’d need a reverse proxy, so, to try and speed things up, I simply copied the Apache config file for a different service on my server and edited that copy as necessary. I edited the port…
But didn’t think to check the protocol.
See, the other service I happen to use that runs through a reverse proxy, for some weird reason, connects to the internal socket over HTTPS. Not HTTP, like Ghost was calling for.
Did I realise this at the time? No. No I didn’t. So I spent over 5 hours trying to troubleshoot a HTTP 503 over a config file.
I uninstalled Ghost, and reinstalled it. Big mistake. Server completely locked up.
As a result, I couldn’t do anything about Ghost, until I got home, to be able to force-reboot the server. The Ghost install went fine afterwards. Up until it started throwing errors at me while trying to start Ghost because somehow I typed “htts” for the url instead of “https” for its config.
Oh and also, all of a sudden, Apache and Ghost don’t want to work when i set “url” to https. I have literally no clue why.
Post-install: The Experience
So far, Ghost has been nice. It’s significantly more responsive than WordPress (what this site happens to run on!), and the editor is great, but it’ll take a while before i’m used to not having the sidepane there the whole time.
Also, I’m very delighted that the admin interface has a native dark mode. WordPress needs a plugin just to pull that off, which is mildly infuriating.
To be honest, if it weren’t for the Contact Form 7 plugin for WordPress, I wouldn’t hesitate to switch over to Ghost entirely.
If I had to give Ghost a score, out of 10.. I’d give it.. a 9.
5/5/2021: As I write this, it appears Ghost has gotten a little slower. Don’t know why, though.
Leave a Reply