New site who dis

One thing I've wanted for a long time and just never gotten around to it is a blog. In the age of social media, it's never been easier to post your thoughts online. There's also sites like Medium that allow anyone to make blog posts on their websites. But I wanted my own. So, here we are.

I've partially been inspired by a friend who sends out life updates through a newsletter. I think it's lovely, and kind of like sending a holiday card out to loved ones, but without the cost of postage.

It's also long form, which means I can post anything from life updates to tutorials to short stories.

How I set up the site

The site was easy to set up for the most part. I used PikaPods and Ghost which helped spin it up easily.

The hard part was configuring the DNS. However, it wasn't the DNS part but rather the platform on which I had the DNS records: Nexcess. I'm not a huge fan of Nexcess, they are simply a relic from when I was first starting my journey into web dev, it was what the company I worked at used. Nowadays I use Krystal. Are they better? Eh, haven't had issues yet.

The issue with Nexcess is that setting it up to point to the main domain and not a subdomain (i.e. clairross.com vs. ghost.clairross.com) is a frustratingly opaque process. At this point I host my own server, so going from having full control back to managed is definitely convenient because someone else is taking care of things, but it also means you have restricted configurations. Nexcess doesn't even let you set a root (@) CNAME DNS record - had to have one sentence of pure jargon.

What's next?

I've been working on a number of personal projects that aren't complete. While I probably won't post as much details about the contents of those projects, I do learn a lot of things while working on them that I'd write about.

I do have some public projects on this site that can also be checked out, with more to be added later on.