Welcome!
I've been debating about starting a blog for a while, and I've finally decided to take the plunge and set one up! Having never blogged before, I imagine my posts will need some work and may not get much interest for a while but hope I can share my thoughts and ramblings on various topics from technology & computing to cars and cooking guides.
What is Ghost?
You might have noticed a "Powered by Ghost" footnote on the bottom of my blog, and be wondering what Ghost is? Well, Ghost is a Content Management System (more commonly known as a CMS). Other common CMS's include WordPress and Drupal. All of these make it easier to create websites or blogs without writing raw HTML code.
Why not WordPress?
For many years, WordPress was the go-to option for hosting many online blogs and websites. Every job I've worked at has been running at least one WordPress based website. In fact, I even used it myself to create an online CV. But maintaining a WordPress site is hard work. My own CV site became stuck on the version of WordPress that I originally deployed to it back when I was job hunting, I couldn't even perform one major update. This is a big issue since vulnerabilities in the WordPress code are regularly being found and exploited, not to mention all the plug-ins that get compromised too!
Why Ghost, then?
The beauty (to me at least) of using Ghost CMS is that the dependencies and footprint are much smaller than a typical WordPress instance. I still needed to set up a MySQL database, but I didn't need to faff around getting PHP installed as well as a web server to serve all the PHP code. Instead, I run a Cloudflare tunnel that proxies traffic to the port exposed by Ghost. And the best part - Ghost can be updated with a single command:
ghost update
Will you be using AI/ML?
No, neither Artificial Intelligence (AI) nor Machine Learning (ML) will be used in relation to writing this blog. I believe that for a blog to be personal, I should be the one that writes it, even if that means my grammar or sentence construction may not be fully on point! I also experience AI fatigue during my day job, it is so excessively pushed on me that I am not a fan of using it. My attempts to use LLM's such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini and self-hosted models on Ollama regularly provide unreliable outputs that often mean I am spending more time trying to troubleshoot the buggy output that I could've probably done it myself instead.
So you hate everything that's AI?
No, not at all! I do believe that there are some really good practical applications for AI and ML tools, for instance I run a Frigate NVR and an Immich photo server at home. Both use machine learning, Frigate uses a Google Coral TPU to help locally identify types of objects, and Immich amazes me with how many items it can detect in an image/video, making it way easier to find old photos based on their content rather than trying to remember when they were taken.
The problem I have is that AI is pushed so much by corporations and managers as a "silver bullet" that can and should be used to solve every single problem, and that it can never do any harm or get things wrong. Any discussions to the contrary are just treated as AI skepticism or "you're using it wrong" rather than being taken on as genuine feedback.