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Right then, the Ghost V1.0 was out a while back and they made Ghost 0.11.x an LTS so I was not in any rush to upgrade too. I have not had much time to sort this out for a while and two days back when I finally came around to check how to upgrade, my first moment of concern was that officially supported stack is for NGINX.

I have moved my blog to the Apache Stack on DigitalOcean and while on my sandbox environment I still have NGINX, that is not a place I want to host my blog from. Anyhoo, I realised soon enough that while not officially supported it s easy to bypass the restrictions so I went ahead.

The upgrade itself couldn't have been simpler considering the major version bump. The answer to the question 'Was it worth it?' is something we will have to wait and see although I am liking what I see except for the initial hiccups.

Success

EDITED AFTER THE POST: Boy oh boy - just after I finished this post I saw the latest version of Ghost V1.12 is out and it was such a painless process compared to past. Just a simple command 'ghost update' and job done. That itself makes this whole pain kind of worth it.

OK so the steps I took are as presented below.

  • in Software
  • 7 min read

Markdown and Gantt Charts

For a fairly long time, I have been looking for a simple markdown type of solution to be able to quickly draw Gantt charts but never came across what one would call a quick option. It has always been an involved process.

To my simplistic mind, a simple solution would just be an option where I can type the action, a start date and an end date for the action line after line and it get's displayed in the Gantt chart.

Background

I have been with PlusNet for over two years now and am a happy camper as far as fiber optic broadband is concerned but as I am no longer on a broadband contract with PlusNet and had no intention of going on one, so the only way I could get a change to my ageing router was by purchasing a new one.

Hence I started reading about my options and soon enough realised that an old router can be given new lease of life using DD-WRT. Equally soon-ish I also realised that the router from PlusNet - TG582n - is quite rubbish and does not play nice with any of the open source firmwares.

So I figured that if I have to just play around a bit, I might as well start with something cheaper and cheaper is what I found in the TP-Link router TL-WR841n at just £16.00. You can't get any cheaper than that in my opinion. OK, so now that we have established that I am cheap and my new router is cheap, let's move on to interesting stuff.

I had read that TP-Link router and specifically TL-WR841n plays nicely with DD-WRT but it was only after I had my new toy did I realise that these things also come in hardware version and while interwebs is filled with instructions on installing DD-WRT for upto v9, when it comes to v11 in Europe, it can be a bit tricky to proceed. There are some instructions in forums1 but nothing that walks one end to end hence this post.

Ethercalc

Ethercalc is good tool which can be selfhosted. It is fairly simple to do so. Though it will be available for anyone who has the URL because there is no inbuilt login mechanism.

Tomcat 8.5.4 on Fedora behind Nginx

Install Oracle Java

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#install jdk
wget --no-cookies --no-check-certificate --header "Cookie: gpw_e24=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oracle.com%2F; oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie" "http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/8u102-b14/jdk-8u102-linux-i586.rpm"
#install jre
wget --no-cookies --no-check-certificate --header "Cookie: gpw_e24=http://www.oracle.com/ oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie" "http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/8u102-b14/jre-8u102-linux-i586.rpm"
#enable firefox plugin
alternatives --install /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so libjavaplugin.so /usr/java/jdk1.8.0_102/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so 20000

Tip

URL for JDK and JRE is best obtained directly from oracle website

The complete walkthrough of my blogger to ghost migration

The 7 Year Itch

It can't possibly be a coincidence that this is the 7th year since I started blogging on blogger and therefore it is very likely to be a strong case of the 7 year itch syndrome but whichever way you look at it, divorce was inevitable given blogger had just stopped inspiring me.

I have been fiddling with different blogging platforms while getting accused of neglecting my sweet and loving family...😢. Ghost caught my fancy three weeks back. The last post was the beginning of our courtship and this post tells the tale of how a casual fling turned into marital commitment. 😂

To start a fresh blog, choosing any platform is easy and straight forward but to move from one platform to another is - umm... lets just say a very involved process - rewarding but involved.

Love can move mountains!!!

A complete migration from blogger to WordPress would have been way simpler. I know this as I have done it in past and it appeared like moving to Ghost would require migrating to a WordPress instance anyway. There was - I must admit - a temptation to call WordPress the home but that wouldn't have made a great love-story now - would it?

However, the much publicised WordPress route to Ghost migration did not work for me and eventually after a lot of manual copying, pasting, cleaning, pruning, hiding, reading and learning later, the self-hosted blog is all complete.

Ghost on Fedora 24

To install Ghost as my blogging platform, I had to go through a number of hoops and one of them was to get the nodejs working and what not. I figured this might as well be worth documenting in case I have to do this all over again. It might also be helpful for some other inquisitive minds. 😄

The most useful reference I found was the post on rosehosting website specific to CentOS 7.

It would have all gone well too; had it not been for the nodejs related issues which resulted in me finding the other helpful pointers from various forums.

Anyway, the steps I took to get this all working are detailed in my notes below - keeping it, where I can, true to the post I have referred above: