Under the Hood

This website is running on a virtual machine operating on the Oracle Cloud Free Tier. Why?

  1. It's free
  2. It was a fun challenge to create a reasonably responsive site within the limitations of the free tier
Google PageSpeed Insights

Setup

I chose to stick with the default OS, Oracle Linux 8.6. I'm utilizing Docker to run the open-source platform Ghost to power the blog, and Caddy to manage TLS certificates for HTTPS encryption. Both containers are configured to automatically restart should the VM reboot or Docker restart, so the site should be self-sustaining.

Challenge 1 - Aesthetics

The theme I chose, Edge, wasn't exactly what I imagined, and gasp didn't come with a dark mode option. With limited frontend experience, I had some brushing up to do, but was able to achieve what I wanted by modifying the theme code and using the Code Injection feature in Ghost to overwrite existing CSS.

Challenge 2 - Inconvenient Posting

Creating posts through the Ghost UI wasn't necessarily difficult, but not something I wanted to do every time I generated a post-worthy image. To solve this, I wrote a Python script using the Ghost API which loops through an "Upload" directory and processes each image by uploading it, creating a post, then moving the image to an "Uploaded" directory. This script is automated through Task Scheduler, so I simply name and drag images to "Upload", and they appear on the site.

Python Image Uploader Script Snippet