A new blog

Table of Contents

Here we go!

Who am I? #

I’m Stanislas, an 18-year-old French tech enthusiast.

My areas of interest are:

Linux and sysadmin stuff
Free and Open Source software
Security and Privacy
Anime and other weeb stuff

I am currently studying software engineering, and I work at a French web hosting company.

Why this blog? #

I have been running a French blog, angristan.fr, since 2014. Over the years, I began to read and listen to more and more English resources, and by now I think it’s my main language, except that I still speak French IRL, and I’m not really fluent in terms of writing and speaking. As such, I’ll ask you to bear with me as I’ll probably make some (many?) mistakes.

I created this blog because I wanted to have an English version of angristan.fr. I like sharing knowledge with the French community, but I always use English on the Internet, so it makes sense to also have an English blog.

Also, from time to time, non-French speakers I interact with have said they wished they could read my articles because they seemed interesting.

What will I talk about here? Probably the same kind of subjects as my French blog and the things I mentioned at the beginning of the post. Maybe shorter articles? We’ll see.

Why Ghost? #

I use WordPress on my French blog, which I love because I can do about everything I want; it’s incredibly flexible. However, it’s complex and you can break it really easily. Same thing for PHP: it’s super easy to install and edit, and I’ve learned a lot about PHP-FPM optimization and so on.

I am not discovering Ghost though: I tested it in 2015, release 0.6, I think. At the time, I already liked its minimalist aspect: WordPress had so many options, and Ghost was just focused on the content.

However, it was still missing many features and even though I could import my WordPress stuff, it was not ready for me.

So here I am today, running Ghost 1.20.2… It’s been some time! Feature-wise, not a lot has been added: it still doesn’t have a comments system or a real image manager. But overall, Ghost is way more polished and pleasant to use. I love the markdown editor, and even more the night theme!

Casper, the default theme, has also been improved. I’m planning to write a post on this subject.

The install guide is pretty easy, and ghost-cli is such an awesome tool.

I tried to run Ghost in Docker, but I wasn’t satisfied with it (and I don’t know Docker enough), so here we are for now, with a basic Ghost + systemd + MySQL + Nginx setup. SQLite is fine too, but I have a MySQL server installed already, so why not use it?

I’ll probably do a quick post on my Nginx config though.

So… #

I don’t know how this project will go, but I think I have the need to write English posts. I may keep them quick, because most of the time on my French blog I want to make proper articles and I end up writing for hours, which is a good thing but that also means I have a ton (like, really) of subjects I want to write on, but I don’t. I want to write quite often on this one.

Anyway, that’s all for this introduction post. See you later!

PS: What do you think of the domain name? I have had it for quite some time but I don’t know how it looks to you.