A journey of a thousand pages begins with a single blog post...

• Unknown, 2014

Here I stand, keyboard in hand, turn my face to the mall. In my lap, actually, and only turning to the mall because I have work in 3 hours and I still have some laundry to do and some checks to cash. But here is the start. My blog is now officially up and running!

What to Expect

This blog is probably going to be a collection of my opinions and writings about both trivialities and important issues. If you care for my take on various world politics, ideas on how to mismanage life less, and what the best team in Verona is (hint: it's Chievo), you're in the right place. If not, bug me to write about something else, and I'll see what I can do.

FAIR WARNING

I do intend to share my views on issues that I am not necessarily well-informed about, or that are thorny. I am a white cishet male, and I cannot fully understand the experience of systemic and institutional oppression. I will work to make this blog as welcoming as possible, but given that I do not fully understand institutional oppression, I cannot guarantee that this is a safe space. I will undertake to write about difficult things, and I will make mistakes. This disclaimer does not excuse the mistakes I will make, but is a warning to you, the reader. Any post I think will be especially upsetting I will put a trigger warning on. I hope to get a better understanding of Ghost and CSS so that I can put this warning as a sticky on the main page.

Blog Structure

I was planning to do this on Blogger, but then I got started on a Digital Ocean droplet and began looking at how cool Ghost was as a blogging platform. Last night I registered this domain name (for 2 whole years!) and began reading about how to install and set up Ghost, Thanks to its relatively easy setup, many blogs and helpful posts scattered around the Google, and some previous knowledge about Linux-y stuff, here we are.

This is currently being hosted on the cloud server/VPS provider Digital Ocean. I had two months of free hosting, so I've decided to try it out. So far (three days) it's been fine. It's fun to play around with and the tutorials on their support website are pretty good. But it definitely helps to have some Linux experience under your belt before diving in. I might back up the data I have on this one and do a fresh install with Ghost preinstalled, because I'm not sure how much extra cruft I have on the system by compiling myself. Anyway, for $5 a month it's tough to argue with a VPS.

Currently this blog is on Ghost proxied by Nginx to port 80. The plan for the future is to have the domain willdierenfield.com as my personal website using some HTML and CSS that I'll learn later, and use Ghost in the subdomain blog.willdierenfield.com to continue this blog. I might even do separate Ghost instances for a couple of blogs, but for that I might have to upgrade my service to the $10 a month bracket. Who knows. I probably won't have enough visitors/enthusiasm to justify that. But here is my start.

Cheers to Honza Cervenka for having an awesome website that gave me the idea to do this, and for generally being someone that I miss a lot.