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- Written by: Steve Sande
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Setting up and running this website on a Raspberry Pi 500 was an iterative process, not an immediate decision.
Although I'm perfectly aware of the capabilities of the Raspberry Pi 500 (mine has 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage), I really didn't want to create a monster installation on this computer. Now, I've been using WordPress -- a "Content Management System" --- on various platforms since 2004, and one of the reasons I really didn't want to use that tool is that it seems to have turned into a fairly unusable way to do simple blogging.
WordPress runs in an AMP environment. That is, it can run on any machine or server that runs the Apache web server, a MySQL database server, and the PHP scripting language. There are a lot of "themes" that one can buy or download for free; they define the look and feel of the website, as well as the navigation of the site. There are also thousands of plugins, which are extensions that add capabilities to any website.
That flexibility comes at a price. I recently moved a good-sized WordPress website that I run for a non-profit over to Squarespace (a website hosting service) primarily because the site was running very slowly under WordPress and anything that we could do to speed up the site would have been very expensive. Did I mention that it was for a non-profit?
With the LifeBits.blog site, I just use free hosting over on Substack. It's easy and powerful, and of course every article is sent to subscribers immediately. I could have just created a "current projects" sub-Substack and be done with it. But nooooo, not me! I started looking for low-impact blogging tools that would run on a Raspberry Pi… (click that “Read More” link below to get into more details)
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- Written by: Steve Sande
- Category: Blog
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If you’re reading this site (and someone is…) you know that I run LifeBits.blog on the Substack hosted blogging platform. That platform has some really nice features; it has a newsletter capability built in, so every post can be sent to those who subscribe to the blog.
Bludit, which is what I began using for this self-hosted website, isn’t as good. It’s not meant to be a huge publishing system like Substack and it doesn’t have quite the number of users as something like WordPress, but it serves well as a content management system (CMS) that can run on pretty much any computer.
Part of the “issue” is that this is an open-source and free blogging platform, and things like plugins (extensions to add functionality to the Bludit system) and themes (the visual look of a website) are created by users. That means that they’re usually unsupported and don’t work well.
Some of the plugins that I’ve tried to use suggest using the “settings” gear icon to configure them, but the gear icon does not work for this purpose in any of them, so obviously that function has been usurped by Bludit. Nobody updates their plugins or themes; although some show that an update is available, it’s impossible to update.
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- Written by: Steve Sande
- Category: Blog
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Yet Another Web Site. I have created, deleted, and maintained so many websites since my first one in 1994 that it’s a bit ridiculous. I guess I like the fun of getting these set up, I blogged professionally for many years, and now it keeps my retired self busy.
If you haven’t had a chance to read the “About” page (click that link in the upper right corner of this page), here’s what I’m doing:
LifeBits is my Substack blog where I am creating an online history of my life in tech from the very early days in the 1960s when I was a kid.
LifeBitsBlog (this website) is the self-hosted (on a Raspberry Pi!) blog you’re currently reading where I will keep everyone up to date on my current tech projects. I can’t help myself; I just love to write and I like playing with technology. There’s a lot I’m doing right now and it just doesn’t fit the intended audience for LifeBits.
I’ll write a bit more about the content management system (Joomla) that I’m using to run this site in a future post. But that image at top? That's what I was doing 30 years ago in the web space. Yeah, it is a bit on the retro side of things, but it provides context…