Server Shutdown

The past several months have been a rollercoaster for dabbling in tech!

As most of you know now, I completed my Responsive Web Design certification over on freeCodeCamp back in January. I knew a little bit about designing static web pages with HTML and CSS from my younger days trying to make my LiveJournal or MySpace pages much more stylized, but there were a lot of new concepts that I wasn't familiar with. I still struggle a little when it comes to Flexbox and positioning things exactly where I want them, but I got through the course and I felt really accomplished. So much so that I wanted to start building right away, so I coded my own website, started blogging again, and even started my own web server! You can read more about that and the trouble I've had with it over here.

Coding my website and watching it evolve as I learned more CSS tricks and even a small bit of JavaScript was a lot of fun and very educational. I completely understand now when seasoned pros at this stuff say that the best way to learn is by doing it independently. I also love blogging, writing, and creating content on the web. Even though my websites seem to change and vary and eventually disappear over time when I decide to start fresh or whatever, I'll probably always have something similar somewhere on the internet. But let me be the first to tell you that installing and maintaining an instance of Ghost (the platform that powers this blog) was a struggle. Especially for someone with little to no knowledge of how the command line works. I've learned the whole process of cloning and pushing projects to GitHub, but that's about it! What do you mean I have to make and move directories? What do you mean I have to edit a configuration file and set up my own transactional emails? What do you mean I have to expose ports on my server for things to work? That sounds dangerous!

With each new update of Ghost, I wound up breaking things and then spend hours trying to fix it. I had to uninstall and then reinstall the software three separate times. And don't misunderstand me — Ghost is incredible. It is, by far, the best blog and email newsletter platform that I have ever used. And I've dabbled with quite a few over the years. The problem was me. I didn't know what I was doing. I think that I bit off more than I could chew. I guess, by my flawed logic, I thought that managing my own personal server and hosting a bunch of different little things made me more of a tech enthusiast. In some ways, it kinda did. I learned quite a few new things. I even spun up an instance of Flarum to create a sort of chat forum on that server, which was a lot of fun and I really liked it, even though only one other person ever joined. I also wanted to spin up some wiki software for my family to privately use for important documents and information. But constantly breaking things and then spending hours trying to research the necessary fixes got tiresome really quickly.

So I scrapped the entire server.

I rolled this blog and the jiggyflyjoe.com website into one and the same and imported it back to Ghost's own hosting servers. And in the process, I feel like I freed up an enormous amount of time. I felt a little like a failure, but I was recently told that most developers don't self-host anyway unless they have to. And honestly, I felt that in my soul.

The good news is that we're still here and this publication isn't going anywhere now that it's being hosted by the pros instead of me! And I can turn to other solutions for the private wiki, our planned media services, and maybe even still a forum at some point. I really love community building, and I keep telling myself that if I build it, they will come... But for now, if you want to join, you'll have to join my community on Discord. Which, by the way, I had also been unknowingly giving out the wrong link to that community for years now. This one should actually work if you're interested. You can also always find it through the Discord icon up at the top of the page and on the contact page! I'm still working on updating it across the board, so make sure you don't click on any older links for it because it will take you nowhere. Into a scary, dark internet void.

And we don't want that now, do we??