All it took was 2+ hours of trying to upgrade my self-hosted Ghost instance on Digital Ocean and the multiple back and forth steps I had to do that really made me just go

You know what, I think it's time I admitted to myself that I don't like tinkering with my own blog that much.

Ever since I started working in tech, I've gone through multiple iterations of having my own personal site or blog.

JAMstack was everyone's jam at one point, and so I started with Gatsby on Netlify.

I quickly realised I didn't quite like the inability to customise much of the Gatsby template I had used.

Fast forward a few months (years?) later, I had wanted to flex my front-end skills and deployed a static site via Netlify - HTML, CSS, some JS plugins.

Which then made me realise that there was a barrier to entry for me to blog, oh no.

I didn't like writing markdown files for blogposts - in fact I missed the days of Blogspot and Wordpress.com where all I had to do was just type, format, click a button, and voila your post it up!

Pivot, they said, and pivot I did - it took quite some struggle with Digital Ocean, Cloudflare and Ghost, but I made it happen!

However, I now missed the ability to customise parts of my site, and was cursing every time I had to update something via the DO console.

I hope that I will now stick to my current set-up of having a NextJS site as my main website, while having any blog posts live here on Hashnode under a custom domain, as long as possible :')