Kernic

Just my toughts.

Now it's getting Kernic

· by Kernic
Category: Blog
Tags:#personal, #blogging, #introduction

A new beginning for my blog under the name Kernic. In this post, I'll explain why I chose this name and what you can expect here in the future. It's time for a fresh start with new ideas and perspectives.

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20221130_now-its-kernic

I’ve created many blogs before. Most of them eventually died out; my last one was very active until last week. But unfortunately, I had started and run that blog under my gamer tag. On the one hand, that’s not very professional, and on the other hand, while the name - eXeler0n - is pretty cool, nobody recognized the zero in the name and assumed it was an O. Understandable.

My previous blog first ran on WordPress, probably the most well-known and widespread blog and CMS system on the internet. After all, about 43% of all websites tracked by W3Techs use WordPress as their CMS system¹. Unfortunately, WordPress also has its downsides. The two biggest are security and performance. A CMS system built for many different purposes is inevitably not lean. Additionally, WordPress can be heavily extended with themes and plugins. However, this makes the core system and especially the plugins and themes resource hogs and potential sources of security risks. Two abuse-warning emails from my hosting provider in the last five years speak for themselves.

The next solution was Pelican as the underlying system. Pelican is not a CMS that runs on a server. Pelican is a Python script that generates static HTML files from Markdown or reStructuredText files. I write my blog posts on my computer in either a text editor or Obsidian, add the necessary metadata, then pack them into a folder and start Pelican. Pelican then generates the static files for the blog, which I upload to my server. Some steps can be automated, but embedding multimedia content is particularly complicated.

It ended up being Ghost

Modern, lean, and interactive

So, Pelican and WordPress were out. There are quite a few alternatives, including for self-hosting. Joomla, Movable Type, Serendipity, and Drupal are a selection of the well-known systems. But either these systems are not designed as blogs (Joomla, Drupal), or their codebase is from the early 2000s, so at best, they’re old-school.

But one system caught my eye: Ghost. Ghost is a lean and modern blog system with a focus on usability and interaction. There are no plugins, only “integrations.” Of course, there are themes, and they are consistently responsive and stylish. No comparison to my old blog, which was absolutely functional but was rightly criticized for its dated design.

Currently, I’ve chosen the theme “alto.” But that might still change. It’s hard to judge themes when you only have a single post. We’ll see where I end up.

But Ghost offers two other features that I find interesting. Actually, it’s just one feature with two parts. You can become a member of my blog. This membership could be paid, but it doesn’t have to be, and in my case, it isn’t. You will then get access to posts that are exclusively for members; and you’ll be notified by email about new posts. So you get a Kernic newsletter delivered directly to your inbox.

The content here isn’t paid, but you’re welcome to sign up for one of the two paid memberships. What do you get for it? My thanks and my attention!

Finally, I have only one last sentence: I hope you enjoy my future content and have fun reading.