Setting up a blog
I have been trying lots of different ways of getting a blog set up on my website.
I started with WordPress in a subdirectory, which worked great but was a little tricky to keep working. WordPress has a lot of moving parts, Apache has to work, PHP has to work, your permissions on your file structure have to be exactly right, there's a database to maintain, security has to be tight as a drum because hackers target WordPress, and the list goes on and on. All this means that WordPress will just stop working from time to time. An automatic update will break it, a hack will break it, a change in the weather will break it. All in all it was just taking too much of my time to keep it up and running.
So the last time I got the famous white screen of death, which is all that is left after WordPress dies on its ass, I just wiped it and started looking round for a new solution.
A couple of options looked interesting, such as Ghost and Jekyll, but both required complex setup, adding even more variables to the mix, such as nginx and ruby on rails. At my skill level and with the time I have available for sorting out maintenance issues, they both seemed a little too time intensive.
I then checked Medium, and it is a great and fun experience to use it, but it is a blog on another site. I could put it in a widget, but the widget didn't even give my blogs thumbnail pictures. So I kept googling.
On one of my google searches I accidentally typed "host blog in subdomain" instead of "host blog in subdirectory." Instead of star bright illustrations.com/blog, it turned out a blog could be blog.starbright illustrations.com which I hadn't even realised.
I looked around to see if any blogging platform could be easily set up this way, and it turned out that good-ol' blogger offered this functionality with a simple change to site DNS. So here we are, my new site blog, on blogger. We'll soon see if this is the start if a glorious adventure or just another abortive experiment.
I started with WordPress in a subdirectory, which worked great but was a little tricky to keep working. WordPress has a lot of moving parts, Apache has to work, PHP has to work, your permissions on your file structure have to be exactly right, there's a database to maintain, security has to be tight as a drum because hackers target WordPress, and the list goes on and on. All this means that WordPress will just stop working from time to time. An automatic update will break it, a hack will break it, a change in the weather will break it. All in all it was just taking too much of my time to keep it up and running.
So the last time I got the famous white screen of death, which is all that is left after WordPress dies on its ass, I just wiped it and started looking round for a new solution.
A couple of options looked interesting, such as Ghost and Jekyll, but both required complex setup, adding even more variables to the mix, such as nginx and ruby on rails. At my skill level and with the time I have available for sorting out maintenance issues, they both seemed a little too time intensive.
I then checked Medium, and it is a great and fun experience to use it, but it is a blog on another site. I could put it in a widget, but the widget didn't even give my blogs thumbnail pictures. So I kept googling.
On one of my google searches I accidentally typed "host blog in subdomain" instead of "host blog in subdirectory." Instead of star bright illustrations.com/blog, it turned out a blog could be blog.starbright illustrations.com which I hadn't even realised.
I looked around to see if any blogging platform could be easily set up this way, and it turned out that good-ol' blogger offered this functionality with a simple change to site DNS. So here we are, my new site blog, on blogger. We'll soon see if this is the start if a glorious adventure or just another abortive experiment.
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