"I know, I should write a blog post."

There's a "now you have two problems" joke in there somewhere.

It should (there's that pesky little word again) be simple. Writing sentences is something that I seem to manage without too much difficulty. Left to my own devices, I've been known to ramble on about sundry topics for inordinate lengths of time. At least with a blog post, it's easy for others to smile, point at their watch, and exit the room without awkwardness. And thanks to some passing interest and expertise with tech *stuff*, hosting details aren't really an issue.

For some inexplicable reason, the platform decision has always been a strange kind of stumbling block. I tinkered with different platforms over the years, and invariably found some something that I didn't really like, or picked one that I thought I should (at this point I need be sending that word royalty checks) be using.

- Analysis paralysis enters stage left -

It wasn't a problem of lack of familiarity. I've worked with many "blog" platforms over the years. Some were in an official capacity (i.e. $JOB stuff), others purely in a hobby context, and occasionally both. Drupal was a favorite of mine about twenty years ago. I even tossed some money their way, back when they were in dire need of new server hardware. Wordpress was something I didn't have a strong opinion about until I had to manage multiple instances as part of my job for a few years, and I now have a visceral distaste for it. In any event, it became clear that a traditional CMS was overkill for my needs (which is saying something, as overkill tends to my normal mode of operation).

So then the pendulum swung all the way to the other side, and I started playing with the various static site generators. There was Pelican, Hugo, Jekyll, and maybe a couple others that I don't remember anymore. Each were okay, but I found myself tinkering with workflow automation more than writing actual posts. That led to its own special kind of demotivation spiral. Though, out of the bunch, I did like Hugo the best.

Eventually I decided to try a kind of middle ground between a full CMS and a static site generator. That's where Ghost came into the picture. It makes a nice narrative to paint it as a Eureka moment, but it wasn't that at all. In fact, I kept oscillating back and forth between Hugo and Ghost until I got annoyed enough with the ping pong game that I just put the whole notion of writing blog posts on ice indefinitely.

Some random amount of time after that, Twitter played a disastrous game of chicken with a terrible person, and I moved my social media involvement to Mastodon. It didn't take long for me to stand up my own instance, and I've been there ever since. Along the way I started to read about ActivityPub, as that's the bit that makes things like Mastodon work, and liked the idea of hooking it up to a blog.

Yes, that little whisper that started this post had returned, and now I had two problems again. The ping pong board was stood back up, and I started batting the same CMS vs static site question back and forth. The little game didn't last very long this time around (you see, while I'm a slow learner, I do sometimes learn), and back to the ice shelf the whole mess went.

Then the Ghost people announced something interesting. They were going to integrate ActivityPub into Ghost! I followed along with the posts for a while, just to see if it sounded like there was a decent chance of the idea panning out. Turns out they were serious about the whole thing. At the time of this writing, it's only available as an early beta feature for Ghost hosted sites, and will be showing up later in the self-hosted version (I think it's supposed to be part of the 6.0 release). That was enough for me to drag the blog idea out of the freezer, and settle on Ghost as a platform (for better or worse).

There were still a lot of things to puzzle out as far as domain names, writing workflow and other tidbits that I tend to overthink, but more on that later. The important bit was the dreaded ping pong table remained folded up and stashed away. All of this happened while I was doing a reevaluation of the various pieces of software that I use for this that and whatever, so while the ping pong table was sleeping, I was able to do some other cleanup and consolidation. I'll prattle on about those things in future posts (pinky swear!).

Now that the thousand words of preamble is done ...

This post is hopefully the beginning of some regular postings. Some will be longish, and others will be just little snips (micro-blogging is what I think the kids call it?). I'll be splitting out the technical posts into a different Ghost instance entirely. It doesn't mean I'll never write about tech stuff here, but it'll be more of an overview focus, with the in depth stuff going over to the other site (more on that later). And eventually, when Ghost's ActivityPub integration lands on the self-hosted version, I'll be using that bit too. In the meantime, this will just be a regular ol' blog.

I think this means I now only have one problem? (insert laughter here)