Introduction

My markdown is a bit rusty at the moment, and as is my blogging ability.

I haven't blogged for over... 5 years now.

It's been a while, certainly.

So despite this 'Hello World' being a quaint tradition that is hopelessly outdated (my first encounter with this was when I first started blogging on an Anhosting hosting package with Wordpress), I think it is apt for me to return to the world of blogging with this post.

The Ghost Platform

Regarding the Ghost blogging platform...

My first encounter with Ghost was when I saw the Kickstarter (which exceeded the original asking price by ~800%). I was very impressed with the entire concept, but more importantly, by the design as well.

In an era where publication platforms like the New York TImes' Snow Flakes and more recently, Medium and QZ strongly focusing on the design aspect of the experience, there really isn't any excuse for a static ('static' as in the plain meaning of the word, rather than the web hosting-related technical definition), boring-looking interface to exist anymore, for blogging platforms. I've waited quite a while now, and Wordpress hasn't seemed to improve on this front (aside from the installation of third-party themes which augment the experience, of course).

I really like the minimalist design language of Ghost (both the internal and external parts), the fact that it uses Markdown, the speed of the site.

I have to say I'm very please with the Trello roadmap (the in-depth post statistics that they're planning looks really good) and I'm looking forward to seeing the other planned features being implemented.

Blogging Itself

As such, I have finally decided to pursue and create my own blog, based on the Ghost platform.

Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror blog, which has recently celebrated its 10 year aniversary. I've always been very risk adverse (in terms of blogging): having started up 3 tech blogs (and failing miserably). The idea of spending time and thought writing blog posts (about any topic at all) is painful, when you don't get any exposure to warrant the entire process.

But at the same time, I am comforted by Jeff's post, about how it'll eventually pay off in the end.

Purpose of This Blog

I don't really know, honestly.

There are two broad approaches that I can take with this project – 1) A log for me, with topics that I am interested in at the moment (a linkblog format, perhaps), or 2) Make it a specialist outlet for a particular topic that I am passionate about. But what is that topic? I am really passionate about both technology (the interaction of ecosystems, in particular) and productivity (workflows, lifehacks, ...), but those two fields are intensely saturated.

I'm thinking about starting to learn to code (aside from a very brief venture into Visual Basic and HTML a decade ago, I have zero experience with coding.), so I may document my experience here.

I've got quite a few ideas that I'd like to create and try out, but without rudimentary knowledge of how to code, I can't really bring my vision into reality. The situation is akin to a music aficionado dreaming up of a orchestral song, but who is unable to replicate the song from his mind to reality due to his inability to play musical instruments. Yes, he can hire an orchestra and try to do that, but without the technical knowledge, it simply won't work (or it will take a long time).

The situation is very similar to coding. I am of the belief that the ability to code (even if it's very, very basic, in comparison to graduates of CS courses) is highly important, if a person wants to start a technology startup.

My First Thoughts on Ghost

I really like how quick it is.

Perhaps it's because of the fact that the platform is based off of Node.JS (with less cruft than the PHP-based Wordpress). Or perhaps it's because of the fact that this site is hosted on a SSD-based VPS.

Nevertheless, I'm very impressed.

To Conclude

In the rare chance that you've read this post (the blog still doesn't have a proper domain yet. I'm still running this off of the IP that DigitalOcean has provided me with the VPS package), then I have to thank you for spending your time reading this post.