/ sysadmin

Migration

Hello world

For the last few weeks I have been nursing my Digital Ocean VPS running WordPress until it started to cough and splutter last night.

Last night I received a hiedous message

Error Establishing Database Connection

Which is typically caused by a mySQL having a breakdown behind the scenes. So I took a look at the CPU and memory usage in the terminal and I saw that Apache2 was maxing out of the CPU and causing the issue.
To be honest, I was sick of fixing this issue, so I looked to a replacement, and found Ghost.

Ghost is a blogging platform that brings writing back in to focus. It's lean interface and focus on markdown enables the user to quickly write new content.

It's not without it's issues though.

  • Images must be manually resized before uploading to your blog.
  • Ghost uses posts to create one long blog roll, where as Wordpress can use both posts and pages to contain content.

The second issue, pages and posts, there is a workaround which involves hacking the CSS for your blog to include Twitter Bootstrap
This hack enables you to create a menu on the top of every page, and link to static pages created inside of the Ghost interface.

Top tip, the guides mix bootstrap.css and bootstrap.js with bootstrap.min.css and bootstrap.min.js, and this will cause the changes to look and act funny in your blog, so make sure that you change them to as follows

CSS

alt

Javascript

alt

The rest of the guide is correct, so carry on as normal :)

I'm still tinkering with Ghost, but I am already impressed at how powerful it can be on relatively low spec hardware. I ran the siege website testing tool, and the site survived 500 users per second hitting the site, albeit slowly, but it remained online throughout...my old WordPress site could not handle that level of traffic.

I'll keep blogging about any issues / surprises that I find as I am sure to learn more about this great blogging platform.