Considering moving from Domino-based Blog to Ghost and node.js
IBM Domino is no longer my primary platform for doing browser-related stuff. Has not been for a couple of years.
This has led me to look at where to move my blog, to which Blog Content Management System. And it looks like Ghost.
I will sum up what my thoughts and findings have been.
I really would like to move to a model where my content is hosted in a server that is running from my closet. So, not a cloud hosting setup.
I want the new CMS to be free and preferably Open Source.
The new CMS has to run on Linux. CentOS has been my Server operating system of choice for years.
At first i thought to use WordPress or Joomla. Joomla is used to run the website of Convergens, my employer, and using Joomla would give me more insight in that tool, which could enable me to participate in the tech side of managing that website.
Then I found a blog post that said that WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are NOT the Best CMS, which made sense when I read it. There is some reason to not just go for what is the most popular tools and instead look at the best tools for whatever you're doing.
That blog post linked to an interesting blog about 15 Blogging Platforms That Encourage You To Write, and I checked out the ones that would allow me to do self-hosting.
Ghost is in that list.
Ghost really tries to make the blogger focus on the content. And content is king, as we all aught to know.
You write your content in a browser. You have two panes.
- Left for writing
- Right for previewing as you type on the left
You use Markdown for formatting your text. So instead of using HTML-codes or using graphical icons (that proxy unseen HTML-codes), you use simple codes to tell Ghost what you want done with the text.
If you want something bold, you type "bold", ff you want a heading you type "# Heading".
Really simple.
And uploading and inserting images is really easy too, done on the fly as you write.
Ghost is based on node.js.
So, right now I look at what work needs to be done to move from the Domino blog - based on the BlogSphere template - that I have been using for years to Ghost.
I have decided to move my content manually from the Notes-database to Ghost.
Yes - copy-pasting and then hand editing afterwards. I have about 400 blog posts, so I find it to be doable. This will allow me to fix some formatting issues I have created some years back when I went from my home made Notes blogging template to BlogSphere.
I have done some research, and I now know how to make Google and other site indexers pick up that I have moved my pages.
This gets done using the HTTP code 301, that tells a browser or a indexing robot that a page has moved.
All BlogSphere URLs in my Domino-based site end with a unique key. An example: /JBRT-8XKP5A
On my new Ghost-based blog I have to make sure that entries that I move have the same uniqe key. Probably /JBRT-8XKP5A
In front of the Ghost server I will put an Apache HTTP server with a redirection configuration that will look something like this:
RedirectMatch 301 /(.*)$ /$1
I have tested it, and it works just fine. A browser user accessing /JBRT-8XKP5A will automatically get redirected (301) to /JBRT-8XKP5A.