We're officially migrating to Ghost (coming to an inbox or RSS feed near you soon)
A new home for my blog posts on a new domain
TL;DR:
Don't want to go read the thing in full?
- Ghost instance setup (in Docker Compose)
- Hack Club Arcade 2024 experience (also High Seas soon!)
- You can still follow me on Substack and Medium, as I'll soon be planning workarounds for the Mailgun free tier. God, why am I between Loops, as used by Hack Club HQ, and Buttondown?
Hello there, from a new .dev domain (thanks to the Hack Club Arcade and HCB Ops teams for an 8-year domain registration via Porkbun). I am actually running my own independent publication on Ghost, currently running in a Docker Compose setup.
You may see the earlier post on Bluesky and the fediverse as a soft launch for this one, but I am making this post to make things official. Read on to learn why and how we got here.
Andrei Jiroh Halili
But why? (you asked)
That USD 50 one-time setup fee (per Substack publication, take note) or a Medium membership subscription is too heavy for a Filipino blogger like me if I want to have my own blog on its own custom domain, considering how can be a bulldozer the US Dollar against Philippine Peso in foreign exchange rates (plus my bank's conversion fees if you do the math).
Another consideration why is that walled gardens are a type of internet nightmare you may "never forget" (not these 9/11 jokes on Smosh for those asking for additional context) when closed platforms fail and die. Let me knock on wood in case the VC money dries up in the future, hence why I believe that self-hosting and federated services built via protocols and standards, not centralized platforms, should be the norm and not an exception. (I might have been shilling crypto over at X in the past, but let's move on from that.)
I am from Substack/Hashnode/Medium, will you add my email address to your list?
Not yet (without your permission due to GDPR and other privacy laws), since I can't afford the Mailgun Basic paid plan at the moment, but if you want to help me cover, you can sponsor this blog (and my projects) via GitHub Sponsors. More on that later.
Of course, you can still follow me on Substack, Hashnode, and Medium to keep updated, albeit with a one-day delay (or maybe not, I'll copy-paste from here and publish them all simultaneously).
As of publishing this post, I disabled email newsletters while evaluating the possible free workarounds, including webhook setup for Discord and friends. Keep your eyes peeled on the updates for that.
The infrastructure setup
Since Hack Club Nest has rootless Docker support, I can run a Ghost container with ease without the need to install the CLI, potentially polluting my home directory (and the need to migrate globally installed packages if I decide to switch to Nix-based dotfiles with home-manager), and mess around production environment drift.
andreijiroh-devThe Compose file itself
Months after that convoluted setup, I went with Portainer in Nest with that free 3-node license for their Business Edition. I also have a spare one for my home lab laptop, waiting to be used soon.
And that's a wrap!
That's all the infrastructure chaos and Hack Clubbing behind the scenes, but stay tuned for the first status update of 2025 and other updates regarding Recap Time Squad and friends. Thanks for reading and peace out.
Andrei Jiroh (he/they) is an open-source developer and backend TypeScript developer at Recap Time Squad, a package maintainer for GitHub CLI on Alpine Linux, and a Hack Clubber since Arcade. He is an Autistic Filipino and a full-time high school student.
You can support his open-source work and other endeavors by directly sponsoring him via blog subscriptions here, GitHub Sponsors or see all the ways on his sponsorship website. For Recap Time Squad projects, you can donate via HCB (Hack Club's fiscal sponsorship platform, see disclosures here) or visit the donate page to learn more.