Alright, DNS has propagated, and my domain is now pointing to micro.blog’s servers where this site is hosted. Yay! 🥳

As said, my website is now hosted on micro.blog. The past two years I was using Ghost CMS, which I myself on Hetzner’s VPS (they have a location in Finland) using Docker. While the maintenance and keeping Ghost updated was relatively simple, I felt the setup (and Ghost) was quite heavy for my needs.

After giving it a minute or two, this is what I came up with that I’d like to achieve with my website and the way it’s hosted/:

• Just lowering the barrier for writing
• Ability to write & publish on mobile
• Be able to customize the site if I want
• Make my website the central place on the web where I post, from where it can (optimally automatically) be distributed to other relevant channels where I reside (such as Mastodon and LinkedIn), as per Indieweb’s POSSE ideology/practice

There would have been different solutions and ways of achieving all of the above. However, I’ve known and been following micro.blog for several years. I knew it would fit the bill and the cost would be roughly the same as the VPS at Hetzner’s, so I decided to give micro.blog a proper try. So here we are.

I looked through the built-in themes and some other Hugo themes on Github, but eventually opted using joshdaws0n’s Microwave theme built for micro.blog, in which I made a couple of changes that I needed. I have some additional ideas, but this will do for now.

Now I don’t need to manage any servers and I can write and publish short post without titles (like a social media posts) that get automatically published on Mastodon and LinkedIn (if I so choose) with a link back to my site.

What I have not decided yet - as micro.blog supports Activity Pub - whether I will migrate my Mastodon account to the one provided by micro.blog. I’ll leave that for later and keep using my current account for now.

In any case, I will keep my eye on Ghost. I love that they are open source and they are also doing a lot of work around Activity Pub at the moment.