eric-post.com is alive!

July 9, 2025 · 3 min read

Sr. Systems Administrator

I did it! The proof is right here!

Before you get too excited, this blog is about my hobbies. Stuff like self-hosting and game design. I know... I still think it needs a first post. It deserves it.

I consider my agile board one of my best friends. Each of my posts will be inspired by how I moved a task from left to right, gave up, or something else in between.

I meant to for this blog to be up and running over a year ago. In fact, it was one of my first projects since moving into my new apartment in Olympia, Washington back in late 2023. I knew I wanted to self-host it and wanted something dead simple. To talk about my self-hosting and game design journey as I go through it. Yet, I just couldn't get this task all the way to the right.

I first found ghost, but fell in love with Hugo. Hugo gave me the custom fonts I wanted and the LaTeX compatibility that made me feel fancy. I love markdown and enjoyed the workflows that Hugo offered me.

I then fell into a CI/CD pipeline rabbit hole that kept me treading water on the back-end automation that I couldn't quite get perfect. Constantly testing and tweaking the many workflows I put together. While my instance randomly crashes a few days later with zero errors. No problem, let's put Hugo on my self-hosted GitLab pages! Let's try it out in GitHub pages! Oh, cloud flare has static page hosting, too!

Never thinking about the content. Always testing and building. Can't write until the system is perfect! A year passed...

Once I finally finished all the testing I could think of, I was proud of what I made. Then it hit me. To use Hugo is to maintain a code base. Is that something I want to deal with in the future as this blog grows larger and larger? Nope. I dusted off Ghost and said I was sorry. Picked my theme and chose a stock font. Here it is. Done.

That's the story of how this first post got here. This first one was a doozy for me, but the rest should be easy. Hugo was an awful rabbit hole and I miss it. Ghost lets me just write content. I guess its down hill from here.