The Elusive First Post

Hello World!

Since being interested in technology and gaming, I've always wanted to write my own blog, but due to lack of ideas to write about and much of my time being eaten up with school and college, I never did.

For the last couple of weeks I've been messing about with some new and old blogging software, as well as some CMS stuff, trying to pick out something that suits my needs. I tested out a huge range of software from WordPress to Drupal, even considered creating my own using a PHP framework like Concrete5 or Laravel, but these were all technologies I had worked with previously. I wanted to try something new and fresh, to be part of something that was still growing.

Node.js had been something that caught my eye a couple of months ago, however never got around to touching it until a few days ago. So I fired up a MongoDB instance, which was also something I hadn't tried before, installed Node.js and began to tinker about, starting with the classic "Hello World!" which evolved into a basic commenting system, almost forum-like.

I had a few teething issues with Node, the "Getting Started" documentation could be a lot more detailed and it certainly didn't help that I was trying to do this on Windows 8.1, but once I grasped the basic concept things started to make a lot more sense, albeit, Node is still in its infancy so theres bound to be things that could use a bit of polishing.

After playing about for a bit I remembered this new blogging software I had read about a couple of weeks ago. A quick google turned up Ghost, a project that had launched just a couple of weeks ago, and best of all it used Node!

Shortly, after a bit of wrestling with Windows, I got it up and running on my local machine and after a little testing I decided this would be the software I create my blog with. Its something I could be part of and evolve my experiences with Node as Ghost grows and expands.

Through testing various softwares over the last couple of weeks, I had put together a template that I wanted to use on my blog and although Ghost is extremely minimalistic right now, I hope its something I can develop my theme with, incorporating more of the features I have put together in my template. For now I've taken a few of the key styles and typography as a starting point and hope to keep adding more and more features as Ghost starts to flesh out.

You can check out my theme for Ghost on GitHub, here.