Two quotes come to mind as I ponder the result of my website change:
Don’t fear failure. Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.
Bruce Lee
Pivot!
Ross Geller
I wanted to add an interactive comment section to the site and I have been pushing a rock up a hill for a month trying to make it work. The comment section on my old GoDaddy-hosted website was such a colossal disaster that I baffle myself about why I even want this. On the old site I got 10-100 comments a day and most were in Russian or Arabic. Every day. On that setup I reviewed comments before they were posted and the cleanup was more hassle than the comments were worth.
This site is self hosted and I’m running the same LAMP-ish stack as the hosting companies. I did swap Apache web server for NGINX and mySQL for MariaDB. With those basic tools in place and functioning properly I set about installing Ghost to run the website and support comments. My attempts to this through Docker resulted in slow and painful failure and direct install yielded the same result. I changed it up and tried WordPress with a direct install with similar results. I did not try WP in a container.
Without all the nerdy details, I was able to make both solutions connect to their databases properly and run but the connection to the NGINX server through Cloudflare refused to function. Refused as if it was spiteful and wanted to take vengeance. Refused like it was personal.
Although I could visualize my next steps to try to work this out, including abandoning my friend Cloudflare, I ran out of steam and could no longer continue to try to beat this dead horse back to life. So like Ross advised, time to pivot.
Here’s how interaction will go now. If you want to contact me you have a few methods:
- email me at [email protected]
- tweet to me at @mclaughlin_one_ This is new and I’m oddly excited to see how it will go
- nostr protocol: npub1qwyep082c08l76fr5r76l4v89n2syzx50ny2h8zyca8uvc7e8xrsyfwyj9
Nostr may be pretty cool, especially if you are privacy minded. You can read about Nostr at https://nostr.com/.
The end result is no website redo, no comments, alternate interaction methods and one last stone in my shoe. I’m resolved now that I’m sticking with my current static site format, but it already bugs me that I could not get Ghost or WP up and running on my server. I am a very good guesser and I’m guessing I’ll work on this until I get it to work, even if I never use it. We all have our flaws.