why I'm here + building this

background

I'm Nat, and welcome to my website. This newsletter is a sandbox for anything I think is interesting, relevant, worth writing down somewhere. I'll try to write weekly.

Mostly, I built this because there's not a lot of other great places to put any long-form writing. If I want to write about non-binary inclusion in cycling, or the actual good way to make buttermilk pancakes, or esoteric information about PostgreSQL, I'll probably end up putting it here. Ideally if I can keep up with it, I'll have a good record of where my brain was at during a specific week.

building this

I built this using Ghost. I like Ghost for a lot of reasons – it's open-source (with a paid hosted model), so basically anything I write here is completely portable. The documentation is really good, and setup is really easy. I used Molly White's guide as a reference, although she covers a lot more about subscriber migration that wasn't as relevant to me (but maybe to someone!)

Also importantly, it's not Substack. A lot of people like it, I don't blame them – network effects! But, while it's widespread in usage, it's also the platform of choice for people who traffic in transphobia, and has a pretty well-documented problem with Nazis, which I would really rather not support. That's not to say other social media has solved this, but since I already have a domain, Ghost was the clear winner here as far as ease of setup.

I've trialed this sort of thing with a lot of different platforms in the past. I've used Gatsby for work that's more hands-on, like Boston, in Fifteen Minutes. It's a headache though, unless you want to write a lot of React. It also structured a lot of the data layer around GraphQL, which was trendier at the time for that sort of thing.

The theme I'm using right now is digest. It's unassuming, but fine – no really heavy splash or anything, but the look and feel may change overtime, so stay sharp.

boring infrastructure stuff

I built this on DigitalOcean, using one of their cheaper server sizes (Regular Intel, 2 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, around $12/month). They've got really good documentation on this. I ran into a few hiccups at first, mostly that the first droplet I provisioned locked up at 101% CPU, and the second one failed because Ghost wanted way more RAM than was available.

It looks like it works fine now though. Getting the DNS record and then the certificate set up was remarkably easy and batteries-included – just set up an A record for the IP address. Total running cost is going to end up being maybe $15/month, until I find a way to cost-optimize the server a little more.

this week's cover photo

That's a 6x7 color positive photo on the Mamiya RB67 I have (pictured below). It's Fujifilm Velvia 50, which is currently annoyingly hard to find. The settings are, I think, something around 1/125 and f/8 for settings (I'm bad at taking notes).

See you around.