The journey of YourDaily.Tech

A while ago the idea of YourDaily.Tech has risen. I've always wanted to have a blog or a news website where I could write and share tutorials, opinions and just have a good time.

A couple weeks ago I did a question round on Twitter and Instagram on some advise if anyone had tips on some awesome CMS that I could use to make this website. After a fair bit of research luckly I found it!

After searching on how I was going to host, I decided it was a nice challenge to do a full self hosted site rather than buying a subscription from Ghost their SaaS platform. I decided to go with the 'Once click install' on the DigitalOcean service.

By the way, if you sign up to DigitalOcean by clicking the link in this article you get $200 dollars spending money for 60 days! This means you can also start your first Ghost installation for free in the first two months!

Why did I want to do this?

So for everyone who knows me, I have always liked creating content. Writing articles, creating photo's and video's and building websites. I also love learning about cool marketing things and new technologies, both for web as well as gear like camera's, smartphones, laptops etc.

Something I like even more is sharing my enthousiasm about these things with other people and learn these things to them. With this website I will be able to start learing things project based myself, to then also teach all you guy's as readers.

On top of that I am in the process of building my own Shopify Theme. Right here on this website you will be able to follow the whole process and also learn how to properly build your own Shopify Theme, or edit yours if you would like.

If you want to build a Shopify Store and start selling, send me a message! I will be able to help you!

I though this was plug and play... I was wrong

Uppon creating a account on DigitalOcean I had to create a SSH Key on my laptop and upload this to my account. After that, I had to login into the terminal and connect my account with my laptop. Luckly this was fairly easy on a MacBook.

When logging in into the SSH client via the terminal I copied the command from the installation guide and started my installation. Luckly, I had already bough my domain and the connection was fairly simple made. The reason I mention this, is the fact that during the installation you actually need to already submit a domain name. So, after running the first couple of commands and connecting my DNS settings to DigitalOcean so I can do all my DNS settings from their platform, I left to get some lunch, DNS settings usualy take up to 24-48 hours to update but because of some settings and some luck I was up and running in about 2 hours.

The moment was there and I went and logged in into my newly created website! I was super excited and started to do some manual configuring on the website itself. The makers of Ghost recommend you to secure your database and I tried to do that from the SSH client, however this is where the problems started. I could NOT find the proper password I needed to get this done, I resetted my SSH password, looked online but nowhere they told me how to fix the error of Access denied.

A couple of days went by and I thought I was in trouble. I was like:"shit, my database is not secure... I need to get this fixed!". During this period I kept working on the website, setting up Google Analytics, tweaked my theme a little bit and set up all my social media channels. Luckly, all that other stuff was super easy as that is something I also do in my day-to-day job. One thing the site needed is a mailgun account, and this also did give me some trouble as well. I make some mistakes with my DNS which resulted in it taking about 3 days until that was fixed.

In the mean time I kept searching for a proper awnser on how to get the correct password to secure my database. On some point I had a ✨bright idea✨ and thought by myself to login into the server by an SFTP connection to see how the structure of the server is build. By some miracle I found that the database password I needed was actually stored in a file I could download from the server via the SFTP connection.

I then logged back in into my SSH client and tried to run the command again.... and then.... 🎉 finally! I could walk though the process of securing my database! After that, I looked in my Admin pannel and noticed I could update my Ghost installation. Now, the next problem came along... Ghost needs 1GB of RAM to properly run, but they didnt mention the fact that you actually need at least 2GB of RAM to update ghost while its running. This is because of the fact that Ghost is apperantly quite a heavy process and there was only 80MB of RAM left while it needs at least 150MB. Back to my Droplet in DigitalOcean to shut the Droplet down. I went into the settings of the Droplet and changed the configuration to the 2GB of RAM option. After restarting the Droplet with 2GB of RAM I went back into the SSH, tried the update command again and it worked!

The next thing on my list was the subscribers accounts. I could for some reason not send emails yet. I though it was a build in feature but apperantly you need a Mailgun account to make this work like mentioned earlier. The biggest mistake I made was trying to edit my DNS settings on the wrong website. I tried to edit them on the website I had bought the domain, but I had already linked all my domain settings to my DigitalOcean account so I had to edit it there. After finding that out, it only took 30 minutes to get everything verified and up and running.

After that was done, I had some trouble editing the config files of the website, but after a while I figured it out, now luckly I can send emails from the website which makes sure that you can actually subscribe!

By now the website was finally done, I will make some small changes in the future, like for example the structure of the links and some other small changes. For now I will focus on actually putting out content.

I hope you like the content that I will post. If you have anything you would like to see, do let me know. For now I would like to thank you all for reading this article and hope to see you soon!

- Thom