Hosting a blog with Ghost CMS

I have previously used several blog CMS platforms such as Netlify with Gatsby but have recently decided to give Ghost a try. Ghost is open source and developer focused which has resulted in plenty of quality of life features being built in. Themes are a quick and easy way to customise your blog and integrations allow for quick functionality to be added.

Hosting

For my setup I have decided to use Ghost on Digital Ocean. Ghost offer $100 free Digital Ocean credit which means I can run my droplet for almost two years free of charge. The installation and setup was extremely easy.

1. Add ssh keys to Digital Ocean
2. Configure an A name record in the domain registry to point to the Digital Ocean droplet IP

I did run in to a problem where my installation failed due to missing MySQL permissions seen below.

Message: ER_ACCESS_DENIED_ERROR: Access denied for user 'ghost'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

After searching for a while and finding no solutions, deleting the droplet and recreating it seemed to work anyway.

Customisation

For fonts I have decided to use Fontjoy. Fontjoy uses machine learning to determine aesthetic font pairings and is very easy to use.

I have decided to use the fonts Ubuntu and Nunito. To use them copy the snippet below and add to /ghost/#/settings/code-injection.

<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Nunito&family=Ubuntu:wght@300&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">
<style>
:root {
    --font-primary: 'Ubuntu', sans-serif;
    --font-secondary: 'Nunito', sans-serif;
    }
</style>

My avatar was created using OpenPeeps, an open source vector character creator. These illustrations can be created online with a limited set of features or downloaded and edited with your favourite illustration editor (Figma, Adobe XD).

Themes

I played around with using the Attila ghost theme because I thought it looked clean and perfect for a developer blog. It was a bit confusing at first following the Ghost documentation on adding in Disqus to the blog as it turns out Attilla already had that built in. Later, I found some issues with the styling of the code blocks as Attila had their own styles that took importance over the Prism themes.

I decided to use the default Casper theme with the Prism Tomorrow theme for code highlighting.