Scary Halloween

As much as I appreciate the simplicty of ghost compared to working in Wordpress, when it comes tim e for updates it is.... anything but.

Especially if you haven't been keeping up with the incrementals.

It also doen't do a graceful job of updating dependencies.

So.

Before I get into the sordid details, a bit of fun....

Also a scary story courtesy of Brian Neimeier's Kairos site. Well worth the read. I may have mentioned in the past that some of the experiences I've had in the past lean me toward believing such tales. Patches of woods that felt wrong at night, and so on.

Also - if you haven't read Brian's books, please do.

The following is mostly boring technical crap that boils down to "did a lot of pointless shit that shouldn't have been needed".

So as to the downtime? Simple, really. Sometime in the last month the routine that was supposed to update the SSL cert failed. I go to the saite admin and discover I can't run the command to renew because I'm not up to date for the ghost backend.

Why ghost doesn't make it easy to override the helpful "your cli is out of date?"

Don't know, but ran it. Then ran the upgrade command.

Oh, hey, node.js is out of date, so off to research exactly how to update that.

OK, node is updated. Upgrade took. Try to move my theme back into place aaaannnd. Ghost doesn't like it.

Fortunately I back up like the dickens - see my earlier article - so it was just a matter of zipping it up and reuploading it, but this puts the final kibosh in pulling my themes down directly from a git repository, as the whole reason for the move-aside was due to permissions conflicts between ghost upgrade and git-related files.

But SSL still isn't fixed. OK - looks like acme.sh, the routine that actually contacts letsencrypt for a free cert, can't connect. Fingers crossed, run the update command, and lo and behold, the command to update the certs finally goes through.

So why not go back to wordpress?

First - not inclined to lose a chunk of readership again to another format change/migration. Using ghost I have full control of my own commenting system, something that I don't have with disqus (I'm blocked from several sites, like The HIll) or other cloud-based platforms. I get to run it on my own "hardware" much like the wordpress.org version, but without the complexities, or needing to load five modules just to provide security. The updates, a pain that they are, aren't the constant necessity just to prevent my site joining the borg botnet army. And the interface for making posts is a hell of a lot simpler and more pleasant.

Anyway - hope you all had a fun Halloween.