Hello - is this the real world?

Welcome to my blog. I'm Inan.

After a long break, I'm back at having another go at blogging. Yep, the world needs another one! (Apparently there are around 600 million blogs in the world as of 2022 - don't believe me? Google it! )

It's been a long time since I tried anything other than WordPress to host a blog. On that note, let's talk about the platform side of things.

I have been going in between WordPress, Notion and Ghost to decide which one would be a better option for me.

Now if you are techy enough to make a "WTF? comparing apples to pears" face, let me explain.

I know WordPress well which powers 35% of the entire websites in the world.

I started using Notion a while ago and amazed by how the world can literally run on it too.

I came across Ghost a few years ago, felt like MEH, hasn't got much to offer...

What happened to the ''simplicity is the best policy'' mentality? Surely Ghost with such simplicity and being able to do the main purpose right, must be the right choice?

I guess I did not believe in it much back then. You need to trust a service as well. At the end of the day your business idea might not be worth million $  yet but hey ho. you still care right? :)

Having used WordPress for many years, I ended up installing WordPress first as a result of that above...  Obviously! 🤦  Followed by...

1. A typical dilemma of not being able to start with a clean look.
2. Too heavy inferface.
3. Issues with plugins. Troubleshooting.
4. Add more excuses for the sake of adding more excuses not to use WordPress...

(Oh one second, this above numbered list is done via adding a markdown to ghost blog. Nice. So the editor has not got bullet points. Which is why I had to Google how to do it. Found out if I hover over an empty line on Ghost, the + button that appears allows a selection of modules from the list. Selecting Markdown allows further options to text, such as numbered list, nested lists etc. Nice )

All right WordPress, listen, you bring such drama... Am I here to spend all my life managing a website or can I just for the sake of creating something get on with producing content please?

In hindsight,  I had my sites hosted on HostGator using WordPress before 2020. I had a shared hosting where I could host unlimited domains. Cheap and cheerful.

Cheap was not applicable anymore and cheerfulness gone rather bitter with HostGator. After some time I started not getting along well with the quality of their hosting as well. Number of times I faced downtimes. Bills went up and up. No more discounts. No love for existing clients despite some of my tickets were still handled with care by their customer agents.

I ended up thinking... Should I just freakin move my sites elsewhere?

An obvious YES! but was it worth the hassle?

I'm techy but not your hacker prototype.  Ubuntu commands going wrong, ERROR ERROR floods my screen. Did I even know what I was doing with all that?

Ok fine. Maybe it was not a good idea. So I skipped two more years like this due to trying and failing on my own.

One reason for the failure was due to not spending enough time and ultimately missing the billing period which made me end up paying for another year twice. The next one was a result of dealing with 2 projects at the same time. One resulted in pushing the other one (IE: moving my high traffic website between two servers at Hetzner and considering of moving 3 of my sites on Hostgator to the same Hetzner server too in order to cut down the costs).

So what happened after? Well nothing. Kept the three low traffic sites on Hostgator. Eventually I had enough... No more thinking. A F THAT SHIT moment. (Probably the best productivity hack to date, if procrastinating, turn to a wall and shout F THAT SHIT).

It works. It worked. It will work.

But my first sails were not very smooth. I literally steered my boat towards AWS and started clicking here and there trying to figure out whether AWS would ever be a feasible option for someone who is not quite a sys admin with 250 years of experience in IT. 🤓

Nevertheless, I got super confused with AWS and started feeling extra pressure in my skull, my brain was aiming to get the heck out of there. Cooled myself down a bit and had another go. Came across AWS Lightsail. Then I saw wordpress by bitnami. That moment I realised I run out caffeine for the day.

Having realised it's actually easier than it seems next morning, I went ahead to set up an instance on Lightsail. Installed wordpress again. Then using plugins and exported my Wordpress sites and imported into the brand new spanking fresh wordpress instance on Lightsail. Boom, how easy was that? Jeez all that stress and thinking... I should have done this ages ago.

I then built this site (inanaksoy.com) on another aws instance using wordpress. However, I kind of did not want to use wordpress anymore. It's like, I don't want to spend time trying to fix plugins, resolve security issues, mess up with page layout and not able fix it. For what? 2 people who would visit my page to see a slightly better look? Not worth it. At the same time I hate seeing so many issues here and there. Eating my brains. Causing extremely unnecessary stress. Like seriously? Life is too short...

I need a new CMS or another platform to host a personal website!

Notion

By that time I was using notion quite a bit. Organising my life. You know, setting up daily habits (hitting the gym, reading books, bookmarks and so on)

(Pause here. Did I say with the help of Notion, Audible and Kindle I finished several books in 2 months - not a thing to brag about but I will blog on that to share some insights and hopefully influence myself and others- hold on tight)

I thought, it would be brilliant if I can use this as a website. Oh as I said that, thinking like a true entrepreneur... I started Googling... Darn/good, somebody else thought about it.

Notion website makers

I came across Fruition and then a paid version of it called Super.so. Obviously.

Going back and forth. Looking at the two. Reading the strengths. Watching every single YouTube video about notion sites etc. All good. I mean mostly good. Considering how easy it would be for me to write a blog post in notion while taking notes and without further do, going live with it. Super time saving. Almost instantaneously posting my note. Just what I needed...

First, Fruition - the free alternative

It looked a little complicated.

I did not come across a single finished Fruition site. Seems like everybody had a go at it with a feeling like "Wow it's amazing". You kitten me? A completely free website to host on your own domain?  Then they gave up. Or probably got kidnapped by the money lovers society.

Second, Super.so - the premium alternative

It looked very straight forward. In fact too easy. Is this the case though?

Well, price tag is rather expensive. $12 p/m. Not sure what I get out of paying that much? No alternative, so If I don't want this, can I take my business elsewhere? Doesn't seem like it.

I could not get my head around designing a site in notion. I mean I looked at guides, downloaded super's notion template, looked at their builder (which is nice actually) but in the end it felt like I am going to dig myself a maze like rabbit hole here. I just want to blog for the sake of nobody will be reading it. My site has to be quite easy to launch and super easy to get going. I'm probably not there as a power user of notion yet to actually feel comfortable building it on notion yet.

I then thought... But, if it's not too easy, it will help me develop faster. I could use it as a good excuse to learn.. Ok I went back to thinking of Notion again. Had another look at Super. But one thing made me rather uncomfortable... Page speed insights.

I did a check on Google's pagespeed insights... Not a single site returned high score. I mean, Super.so uses the words "improve SEO" on their blog posts where they are demonstrating product ability but page speed insights and core web vitals is like bread and butter of seo in 2022. It's totally missed.

At the time of writing this blog (16 March 2022) see below the page speed insight score of Super.so for mobile (54/100).

Now, I am by no means a core web vitals expert. I mostly understand the scoring metrics shown above and worked in my day to day projects to help improve our business sites (with our dev team). It's not always possible to improve every metric and sometimes it would be too costly to do so. Also if super.so is not really targeting mobile traffic and not interested in mobile seo, I would say it probably is not going to be their top priority to fix this. However, for the sake of attracting buyers, this would be something they should look at fixing.

Having noticed the above issues along with the not very justifiable cost of $12 p/m for a notion site, I sadly crossed notion/super as an alternative.

So, wordpress gone, notion gone... What next?

Webflow

Then there is webflow.  Last time I had a go at it was a few years ago... Although it looks so much better now in 2022. It's still a bit like the, erm... Do you know any designers who is quite hipster character? He/She might be living near Hackney, London? Definitely wears vintage clothing, has custom frame glasses, starts the day listening to indie rock, pixel peeps from 2 meters... Yep, webflow is the club he attends. When you enter, you feel like everybody is looking at you. It makes you feel uncomfortable. Probably nobody cares about you but still...

I will skip again.

Ghost

Ok, now we are talking. Ghost is quite neat. Wowsie, so many people that I like are using it too. Youtube's productivity superstar Ali Abdaal has it, challenger bank Revolut's blog is built on it, heck even CloudFlare, SuperHuman and DuckDuckGo.

Ok I am sold. Yea cool. What's the easiest way? I'm sure. Err I..

Ghost Pro plan.

Hmm Not bad $9 p/m but it's super limited. Err, I wish it was a bit more flexible. Plans are too much structured around, well, the idea of Ghost blog. Publish, get subs, charge them, make money, pay more for Ghost.

I mean it's actually pretty clear and solid and can't be blamed really... So it's not Ghost's problem. I need something that has flexibility, something that probably not going to build a big subs base to monetise that well, something that won't cost me more than $10 p/m and I can just get on with it and write.

Ok, I like Ghost but back to self hosting. How do I do it? Oh AWS lightsail has Ghost. DigitalOcean seem to be quite popular too. YASS.

Then I ended up trying AWS. Set it up. It was not very straight-forward but did not take too long either. Having seen tons of wordpress lightsail videos on YouTube, I was surprised there is no single Ghost by bitnami on AWS lightsail video yet. No guide out there that captures it 100% either. I ended up following a few guides. Gone through documentation. Had 3 coffees. Had to solve 1 more and 1 more and more issues after logging in via SSH 15 times in a day. I am finally all done. Am I though? Nah, some problems with ghost by bitnami resulted in eating my brains again. I could not solve it with ease and removed the instance.

Ghost should build a better educational approach to guide on how to self host

I know this sounds rather silly as why would they?  People who are self hosting won't necessarily help Ghost make any money, right?

Well put it this way. Self hosting, albeit how easy it might become after top quality how to guides, will still be quite un-reasonable for many. Like, too complicated. If that helps reach mass market getting Ghost out there to much higher number of people, it will equally deliver higher sales to Ghost and bring targeted leads who would be better suited with a Ghost Pro. Win, Win. Ghost needs a true 1 click install which sets everything up. I mean everything. (If 90% of users are setting up SSL on their domains and have similar installation requirements, just provide a simple form to input all the info upfront, 1 click install, done. No single server command. Is this doable?)

Never give up

Back to drawing board. Decided to give Digital Ocean (after telling AWS that ''it's not you it's me'') a go to host my Ghost blog. First confusion followed by another which then led to ''I am going to try this, fail again, but fail better'' attitude. (For some reason one click install of a droplet was not quite one click and installation failing at a phase which made me a little frustrated).

Thankfully, I don't give up that easily though. Third day lucky, I was all set and made it. Self hosted Ghost blog deployed using a premium(like so fancy premium) amd cpu droplet on Digital Ocean. Nice!

I guess, I thought it would be a little easier than this. Either way, it's done now. I am on a self hosted Ghost blog which is cheap but cheerful. I will hopefully figure out the updates and improve my server management skills as a result.

By the way, I will keep on using Wordpress for my other website(s) and continue using Notion for productivity and planning.

I am looking forward to just creating content and enjoying my publishing here at my blog.

Thank you

Inan