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Some more changes are coming

[Disclaimer: this is a technical post. You can ignore this one if you don’t care about blog setups and DNS stuff.]

Just when you thought things had settled down a bit, I up and change them again.

change_is_not_permanent

While I’ve been working on my new website (that I talked about here), I was doing some testing. I decided to test a WordPress setup on a VPS and compare its loading speed to the WordPress setup on my normal host provider. What I found amazed me.

But first, let me take you back to when I decided to use Ghost instead of WordPress, and some of the reasons why I did that:

WordPress was taking 10 seconds to load a page – and longer if more people were visiting – Ghost takes only a second or two…

And…

…there’s just too much ‘bloat’ in WordPress.Too many features, too many functions, and too much of a reliance on a database for my liking.

Well, I take it all back.

My feelings about WordPress at the time were very much based on various points of frustration, mostly around the time it took for the site to load, followed by the fact I was unable to restore my WordPress backup.

From You wouldn’t believe what I’ve gone through:

…I found out that I had a third problem. Installing Ghost via Softaculous onto an Apache server was beset with problems, and unless you had direct admin access to the Apache server to do some really complicated things, it wasn’t going to happen. (I didn’t have that access.) Ghost really needed to be installed on a Unix/Linux server.

Ok, no problem, I thought. Since I can’t install Ghost onto the same server that I’d installed WordPress, then I’ll just restore WordPress and explore other options later. And that’s when I ran into the fourth problem.

The WordPress backup had corrupted and the blog could not be restored.

I got excited with playing with something new, and I went with it. It was further moved along when the WordPress backup was corrupted and I couldn’t restore my blog and needed to urgently develop another solution. Using Ghost was the most appropriate solution at the time.

However, my testing this past couple have days has given me a different perspective on the speed of WordPress.

I setup a fresh WordPress install on my old host provider’s server. With no content it took about 5 seconds to load. Then I got an idea.

I setup a fresh WordPress install on my VPS (virtual private server), and with no content it took about 1 second to load.

The WordPress installation on the VPS gave me the same loading speed as the Ghost blog.

This surprised me greatly!

So after doing a lot more testing, using ping and tracert tools online to check ping returns and the number of server ‘hops’ between my location here in Australia and the two locations in America (my old hosting provider and the VPS provider), the evidence was conclusive.

Using the VPS to self-host a WordPress blog would be very much faster than using my old hosting provider. Not only that, the speed of WordPress was comparable to the speed of the Ghost blog.

This changed things for me.

After a couple months of using Ghost now, some of the things I don’t like about it is that it doesn’t allow posts to be searched or gathered according to Category or Tags. Ghost also doesn’t have any Search functionality. And the last thing I don’t like about it is that the simplicity of the Markdown language for content formatting is too simplistic for my needs.

So I’ve spent today setting up a new WordPress installation of THIS blog on a VPS, and finding a good theme to use, and then configuring it according to my needs. Here’s a small screenshot of it so far:

new_blog

It’s still a work in progress, but I’m enjoying the process.

But I have another challenge….

Because Ghost is so new, there’s extremely limited functionality for exporting content. The developers created a means of importing content from other blogs, including WordPress, so I was able to easily import all my content into Ghost when I set it up.

But there’s NO functionality to export content from Ghost to other platforms. There’s no conversations anywhere about doing this. It’s like no one has even considered someone might want to move away from Ghost…

Since the original WordPress content was corrupted, I’m going to have to manually recreate the content from Ghost, putting it into the new WordPress setup. One post at a time.

Oh, joy.

But it’s not too bad. It’s giving me a chance to redo the categorisation, and also to get rid of old content that I don’t want any more.

Anti-feminism will be disappearing from this blog.

All my anti-feminist stuff is going to be deleted. It’s no longer going to be a part of this blog, and I won’t be writing any more for this blog in future, either.

Instead, I’ll transfer all that content to another dedicated blog for that purpose.

I can hear the sighs of relief from some of you already!

But of course, if any of you still want to read what I write with regards to the anti-feminist stuff, just send me an email and I’ll add you to the appropriate mailing list when I set it up. (Thank you for your interest and support!)

In closing

I will be making sure there’s no break in availability between this blog and the new blog. When all the content is transferred to the new WordPress blog, and everything is set up as it needs to be, I’ll do a simple DNS change of the A Record so that the alansjourney.com domain points to the new server. It should happen in an instant.

I’ve already got nameservers setup for the new blog, so there won’t be any need to propogate changes over 1-2 days.

It’s a lot of fun knowing how to make things work nice and smoothly – but I had to go through a lot of frustrating annoyance to get there! But for me, that’s the best way.


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