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Installing Blogging Platforms

So how has everything been running so far? While distracted by sub-par pizza I’ve managed to get some work done in the past 48 hours.

Starting with developing ideas of how I want my systems to exist, I’ve reformatted the AMD E-350 + 60GB SSD server to Ubuntu server 14.04 x64 and loaded some basic tools (including Bind9 and nginx). I’ve also done a lot in terms of backing up the FreeNAS file server; a task upon itself. Since it uses a 6x 2TB disk RAIDZ2 array, I can’t just shuffle the disks or make changes to them without breaking the array or impacting it’s performance (and reducing redundancy) by removing a disk. So instead the task at hand is to copy all the important files to various other hard drives on various other computers around the house. I’m getting closer to completion, I think there remains only one more terabyte to be backed up at time of writing.

On the remote server front, I’ve spun up the new $20 droplet from Digital Ocean (my referrer link) and installed two blogging CMSs on it. The first is this one, Dropplets (PHP, flat file architecture), and the other is a Ghost (Node.JS, SQLite) platform located at http://ghost.adamogrady.id.au (I also post regularly to my Tumblr).

I’m pretty keen on keeping this Dropplets blog at least for now to record some of my DevOps adventures and perhaps other geeky hobbies while I’m still contemplating a purpose for the Ghost platform. The former platform was pretty simple to bring up (except for getting it to play nice with nginx) but I love the idea of the flat file design and simply composing and uploading Markdown files. Ghost apparently works quite similarly (in terms of post syntax being Markdown) so hopefully I’ll take to that once it’s purpose is cemented in my mind. I’m also a huge fan of Node.js projects so Ghost has that keeping me interested in it, especially as it teaches me more about running server-side JavaScript in a production environment.

Phew. I feel like I’m getting more confident at this small tech-revolution I’m having, let’s hope this continues. I think once I’ve finished I’ll definitely have to redesign my main website home page as well. Something responsive, updated, hopefully stylish that connects more of my presences.