Seablue Journal: Wordpress and Steempress. Take two!

Starting over on the creation of a WordPress blog using the SteemPress plugin. The first time around I used the one-click installer on a $40/month droplet on Digital Ocean. I really wanted to see what type of resource usage a WordPress blog would entail. It didn't really take up much in the way of resources despite the fact that it was using Apache.

Today I decided to go through the tutorial steps from scratch and create a hosting solution that was more tailored to my needs than the default one-click install. The goal was to use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and get the Let's Encrypt certbot installed for an SSH certificate and to use Nginx as the web server instead of Apache.

Some mistakes were made in the transition. I probably should have exported the old WordPress blog prior to moving the domain name to the new droplets IP address. That old blog's admin page became inaccessible after the domain IP address was changed. Without being able to access that, I couldn't export the old settings. I fiddled around with it for a while and then just deleted the old blog completely. The posts that I created on that blog still exist on Steemit, but all the links are now wrong. Oh well. That's life. Time to move on.

I'm making this post from the new blog. The same theme, the same domain name. Everything the same except in the backend. I've never used Nginx as a web server before, so that is pretty cool from the start. Nginx is supposed to use fewer resources than Apache, and this fits in with the other change I made, which was reducing the size of my droplet to the $20/month option.

Manually setting up the whole server from scratch allowed me to use Ubuntu 18.04 as well. The one-click installer used 16.04, which basically meant that two years of this particular Long Term Service (LTS) release had already elapsed. If I'm going to set up a server I would rather have the latest LTS release so it is that much further in the future that I have to consider a major upgrade. There are probably many other advantages to using 18.04 that I'm not aware of yet, such as versions of PHP or MySQL.

I've got the SteemPress plugin installed. In the settings, it is supposed to put the SteemPress tag at the front of any other tags I may choose in the creation of this post. I think I had some trouble with that before. I will find that out after hitting the Publish button when I finish this composition.

It only took me a couple of hours to get the whole show up and running. I'm pretty sure this will be the version I run with into the future. Now I just have to hit submit and, fingers crossed, it will put the SteemPress tag first when it posts to Steemit.