I’ve had a couple of stories in the pipeline regarding recent projects as I worked my way through them. Unfortunately, neither one survived the journey.
Ghost
A few months ago, I documented my foray into Ghost. I’m really enjoying the simplicity of Ghost as a blogging platform. For another site, I experimented with Hugo as an even more stripped down blogging platform.
Updating
After running Ghost for a few months, I discovered I was several versions behind. It turns out it’s updated every week or two. If you install it with a working CLI in a standalone environment, it’s pretty easy to upgrade from the command line. Not so when running in a Node.js environment like the one I have on my Plesk server.
I was going to write about transitioning back to a standalone server. At $3.50/month for a minmal server at Vultr, it’s worth the time saved to just go with this. For a few days, I did transfer the site over to a standalone server, and went through the export/import of the data and images. It’s quite an easy process, but I really wanted to maintain the Plesk version I already had going. I’ve updated my post on the process and will continue to keep that post updated as I streamline the process.
Lesson learned – moving on…
The Mac Mini
I’ve had a classroom projector hooked up to a Mac for nearly thirteen years. I even built a projector box that holds it all. I started with a Graphite iMac, then maybe switched to some Mac laptop (iBook?), then settled on a Mac Mini in what turns out to be 2007.
Yes, 2007. Turns out that’s a really long time ago. So long ago that the latest version of OS X I can run on it still sports the “lickable” Aqua GUI. And now no modern browser runs on it. Firefox and Chrome stayed up to date for a while, but even they started warning me that they were way out of date.
I’ve since switched over to an 11″ MacBook Air, so I’m back to a laptop for my projector. It’s handy because I can look at the laptop to see what’s being projected so I don’t have to turn my back on the class, but it’s a klunky setup. I wanted my Mini back.
It’s running on an Intel Core 2 Duo, so it can run a fairly modern 64-bit version of Linux. I like Ubuntu. But this old Mini won’t boot off of USB (or does it?) and the optical drive is a bit flakey. I found this article from someone who was able to get it to work. After a few hours of this, I gave up. I can start the boot process, but it hangs up at loading the kernel.
At this point, I’m still using the MBA, but a slightly used Mini on eBay is sure tempting. I have a lot of material in Keynote and the general integration with all my Apple devices makes my life easier.
Or will I switch over to some headless Linux box? Stay tuned…