Blogging on MoskitoHero

Daily Notes - A Different Approach to Blogging

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:45:23 +0200

I love writing. I am not a very vocal person, and that’s probably out of a fear of saying the right things the wrong way. Writing gives you a proxy to avoid being misunderstood: you can re-phrase, leave your text to rest for a while, remove and amend stuff. You can re-think stuff and maybe never ever make it public in the end. This is probably why I am more comfortable with writing than with speaking.

I have recently decided to re-focus on old creative activities I have somehow stopped doing over the years of becoming a father, a partner, changing career and more. These include music, electronics and writing.

I am starting this daily notes habit. I will write every day. Not each session will produce a note here, though. Some of my writings will go to this blog, but I hope to start another, more personal one quite soon. Some posts also will be deeper and longer, and require a few day’s work and research.

Another promise I made myself: I will NOT use AI. Neither for ideation, proof-reading, or rewording. Yes, the content I will produce will sometimes be clumsy or unclear, but it will be my content. It will be me. So please forgive me if my thoughts sometimes seem hard to follow — it is just who I am. I will be learning a lot in the process, and hopefully see improvements along the way.

I am currently just starting this series, and I hope I can stick to this effort for a long time.

I’ll keep you posted 😜 !

This Blog Does Not Track You (But You Are Invited to Track It)

Fri, 22 May 2026 14:48:43 +0200

This is just a quick note to tell you that this blog does not track you at all. There are no cookies no counters analytics attached to this webpage or to any other on this website.

I used to have this. I used to track every access to all of my posts on this blog. And sometimes often it was frustrating to see that some posts didn’t get the attention I thought they deserved — take that, hubris.

I used to write in order to reach an audience or increase my visibility on the internet for professional purposes or gain recognition in the Ruby community.

Now I don’t care.

I just write because I enjoy it. These posts are merely my thoughts, laid out in words. And… I don’t track my thoughts. I don’t copyright them or monetize them. Why would I do it here? This is my personal tech journal that just happens to be publicly available.

You may read this blog. You may not. You may subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on social media. You may like what you read, some, or none of it. You may find my thoughts bland or outrageous. But you may not change them. I will not adapt to an audience based on what "works".

That’s also why there are no comments here either.

If you really want to start a conversation and interact with me, you can find me on Mastodon or Bluesky (or even LinkedIn — why not).

And you know what? Writing this way is freeing. I have absolutely no pressure, except for my own desire to write and make it a sane habit.

I obviously hope people enjoy reading this. But I firmly believe that my posts will be all the more interesting if I am not writing for anyone, except for myself.

Set up Ghost with Podman on a VPS

Tue, 06 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I recently moved this website / blog from Jekyll to Ghost, just to try it out after hearing quite a lot of nice buzz about it lately. I had this small personal VPS at hand, so I decided to give it some space there, and use Podman (and its quadlets feature) to set it up. This leverages Systemd to run your docker images. Here is a quick walkthrough, should anyone be interested: Obviously, you need a VPS with SSH access. It must have its firewall open to the web on port 443. My VPS is running Ubuntu, so my install commands will reflect this. I also chose to use root mode to run the quadlets, but there are other options available.

Setup

First, install Podman:

sudo apt install podman podman-docker podman-toolbox

Pull the required images from docker:

sudo podman pull docker.io/mysql:8
sudo podman pull docker.io/ghost:5-alpine
sudo podman pull docker.io/caddy:alpine

The Systemd services

Create a MySQL container file at /etc/containers/systemd/mysql.container with this content:

[Unit]
Description=Blog MySQL Container
After=network-online.target

[Container]
ContainerName=blog-mysql
AddCapability=SYS_NICE
Image=docker.io/mysql:8
Volume=/srv/containers/blog/mysql/var/lib/mysql:/var/lib/mysql:Z
Pod=blog.pod
Secret=blog_db_name,type=env,target=MYSQL_DATABASE
Secret=blog_db_user,type=env,target=MYSQL_USER
Secret=blog_db_password,type=env,target=MYSQL_PASSWORD
Secret=blog_db_rootpassword,type=env,target=MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD

[Service]
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
RequiredBy=blog-ghost.service

Create a Ghost container file at /etc/containers/systemd/ghost.container Do not forget to change yourdomain.com with your domain.

[Unit]
Description=Ghost Container
After=blog-db.service

[Container]
ContainerName=blog-ghost
Environment=database__client=mysql database__connection__host=blog-mysql url=http://yourdomain.com
Image=docker.io/ghost:5-alpine
Pod=blog.pod
Secret=blog_db_name,type=env,target=database__connection__database
Secret=blog_db_user,type=env,target=database__connection__user
Secret=blog_db_password,type=env,target=database__connection__password
Volume=/srv/containers/blog/var/lib/ghost/content:/var/lib/ghost/content:Z

[Service]
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

You need to set up the secrets used in these two files to access MySQL. Let’s do it:

printf $(tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 head -c 13) | sudo podman secret create blog_db_rootpassword -
printf $(tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 head -c 13) | sudo podman secret create blog_db_password -
printf "gdb" | sudo podman secret create blog_db_name -
printf "guser" | sudo podman secret create blog_db_user -

You also need to have the files stored on your filesystem, so let’s create the directories that are mounted in the images:

sudo mkdir -p /srv/containers/blog/var/lib/ghost/content
sudo mkdir -p /srv/containers/blog/mysql/var/lib/mysql

Now, add a blog.network file at /etc/containers/systemd/blog.network

[Unit]
Description=Custom blog Podman network

[Network]
NetworkName=blog
Driver=bridge

And a blog.pod file at /etc/containers/systemd/blog.pod

[Unit]
Description=Blog Pod

[Pod]
PodName=blog
Network=blog.network
PublishPort=3001:2368

Caddy set up

Let’s use Caddy to serve the app to the internet. I chose to leave Caddy out of the blog pod context because I use it to proxy other toy servers on that VPS. Create the service file at /etc/containers/systemd/caddy.container

[Container]
ContainerName=caddy
Image=docker.io/caddy:alpine
PublishPort=80:80
PublishPort=443:443
Volume=/srv/containers/caddy/Caddyfile:/etc/caddy/Caddyfile:ro
Volume=/srv/containers/caddy/data:/data
Volume=/srv/containers/caddy/config:/config
Network=host

[Service]
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

And create the Caddy directory:

sudo mkdir -p /srv/containers/caddy

Add a Caddyfile at /srv/containers/caddy/Caddyfile with the following content:

{
    # email to use on Let's Encrypt
    email your@email.com
}

www.yourdomain.com {
        redir https://yourdomain.com{uri}
}

yourdomain.com {
  reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:3001
}

Do not forget to update the file with your email and domain.

Go live

Now let’s open the gates…

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable caddy
sudo systemctl start caddy
sudo systemctl enable blog-pod
sudo systemctl start blog-pod

And visit yourdomain.com/ghost to start blogging!