We're deep into spring, which was a great excuse to go ahead and do some spring cleaning on here and with all the other stuff I tend to self-host lately.
To set the scene, here's my conundrum: I like Ghost in principle, but some things about it turn me off it quite a bit. One of those? Updates! When you're spoiled by how smooth updates work with Wordpress by now, having to go into the console to update, then praying it didn't fuck up your nginx install or whatever else could have gone wrong is a bit of a pain.
Which is when I decided to give Cloudron a go. I'd heard about it before but was hesitant to actually try it out. Here's what it does: if you want to enjoy the benefits of self-hosting, namely being the owner of your own content, etc., but don't want the hassle of installations, updates, SSL certificates and everything else that comes with self-hosting, Cloudron does all that for you. All you need is a server (for example at Digital Ocean, where I have mine), a domain-name and you're good to go. Cloudron offers a hosted version of their service as well, so if you want to be able to install whatever open-source apps you want and don't even care about the hassle of getting your own server, this is the solution for you. For everyone who does self-host Cloudron, the service is free (and support is splendid).
So, I've moved my Ghost-install from totally self-hosting to hosting by Cloudron and I couldn't be happier. Exporting my posts from Ghost and then importing them into my new installation worked well (after upping the memory allocated to the Ghost app a bit), and the good people at the Cloudron chat gave me ample information on how to work with their command line tool to add the images that Ghost doesn't actually serve with the export.
I've also switched my Wallabag, Nextcloud and FreshRSS install over to Cloudron.
Also, since I now feel a bit more comfortable investing time into cleaning up this mess here (which just tends to happen when you export, import, export again and the import again around a thousand posts), I've started to clean up a lot of the posts. Dead links, dead images, and also Flickr embeds which are now either hosted here or via my new self-hosted Gallery app Koken (which in itself is a fantastic piece of software).
You can now, for example, enjoy my Martini Chronicles again.
Anyway, there's about 800 posts left that still need my attention, so I better get to it.
