I am a Pro-procrastinator. Avoiding blogging, sighting frivolous reasons like, "not having a decent platform to blog with" is my favourite one. Having spent initial days, rigging my own redneck blog, to lazying it out with subtext on geekswithblogs to good old self hosted WordPress. Heck I even went full redneck (or geek if you will) and tried going GitHub Pages. None satisfied me. Or rather none seemed to help me get over my procrastination.
Enter the Ghost
Finally I almost decided to go Medium, but this excellent blog post by @troyhunt convinced me otherwise. So off I go to Ghost.org to signup and sadly they've changed their pricing since. The 8$ a month was real tempting but at 14$ a month I have my reservations. The simplicity of Ghost was still remarkable and I already had it running on a machine at home. What nailed it for me finally was this thing called "Deploy to Azure".
Which automagically deploys stuff to an Azure website, using Azure Resource Manager templates. It's another DevOpsy shiny new thing which I will try to cover in another post. In simple terms it provisions and configures the Azure Website for you and deploys the code there.
That brings us to this potentially bad decision of hosting Ghost on my own. This is forked from Felix Riesberg's Ghost-Azure repo, so a big thanks is due to the dude. This repo is a good example of how and why to use the Deploy to Azure button.
Custom Domain
I have moved my domains to DNSimple and it really is dead simple. Azure website is available as a one-click service along many others and it took less than a minute to setup the ALIAS and CNAME to awverify records. After that its a quick step in the Azure Portal to tell azure that you want to use this domain, and telling ghost you will be using this domain. This can be done at your blog's /ghost/settings/navigation/ page, and voila!
Syntax Highlighting
I am currently trying out Prism.js for syntax highlighting. The installation is a bit of work, uploading one js and one css file to the theme's directory and editing the theme file to link those js and css files.
I hope to write a better todo for this, but there already is plenty of help at Ghost.org. Happy blogging.