The beginning of something new
There was nothing really wrong with my old site and it served me pretty well overall and gave me a great platform to share my thoughts with the world, for better or worse but it was time for something a little... different
As I have grown as a developer I wanted to do something a little different for my site and move to a completely new platform, one of the main ideas behind the move is using a more fully functional CMS system than one I would build. It was enjoyable building my previously one in Django but it does leave a lot to be desired and the site overall is quite messy. As a results I have decided to reconsider my site and for the blog element I am now using GhostJS which is a great blogging platform that is totally self hosted, which I love, and it has a lot of great APIs behind it, which I also love. I am currently implementing more hooks to get it into my main page as well moving forward just to provide a more integrated solution and more options!
I have slowly been building up my new site and am using it as a jumping off point for most of my new and upcoming projects, I have integrated a full GraphQL backend to the site now and will be using that to power a lot of other things I do outside of the site directly. The progress on getting this up and running has been slow as I have been considering different methods of doing things and originally I was going to create a new CMS system. It was working out ok and I mostly managed to pull it together, but it did required a lot of work to get it up to an ok standard and a lot of the nice intergration was still quite a way off, this slowed down my overall progress on the site until I was told about Ghost.
Ghost is a pretty great open source head(less) CMS that is nice, modern and very flexiable, I'm hosting it on my site from the latest Docker image and I currently find it pretty awesome to work with as it is powerful and flexiable and has allowed me to move past the building blog bit to the actually getting my site done bit.
As my old site has a decent amount of posts I am also going to be looking to move them across to this new site as well, that will be done overtime and shouldn't take too long actually dependent upon the method I use to port them over. I also hope this new space will give me the freedom to add posts about other hobbies and interests I have hopefully in a clean manner! As my site has totally changed, from a technology perspective the frontend is mirrored currently but will probably be updated over time also, I will also be going over the details about the stack and upcoming changes.
I expect to be updating the style to something a bit more... me and I am currently working on moving this blog fully into the site as well, however in the interest of just getting it done I think for the first release I might as well just throw it up with it linking here instead and slowly move it internally into my site.
There are a lot of interesting things I've been working on and I look forward to all the change that is still to come moving forward! It is exciting and continuous work but I do hope it will just improve my site and give me more experience playing with a few things outside the realm of work!