Hello World! If you're reading this that means I finally stumbled into making a blog work with a custom domain.

My initial goal with this site is to provide documentation for what I've found or figured out as I continue to improve my skills. I'd also like to use this as an opportunity to improve my technical writing, as the lack of documentation and help is one of the biggest barriers I've found for both myself and others getting started with tech.

To begin, I'll describe how I went ahead with getting a custom domain, setting up email forwarding from that custom domain, and getting this site set up on Ghost Pro. There a lot of options out there for hosting your own site and providers, but I found Ghost responsive when I made a change, and I'd rather not spend time maintaining the backend to a site, just the content.

Custom Domain

I choose Google Domains for my domain registration as they seemed reasonable for their prices. Picked a domain, made sure that privacy was turned on, and as I expect to continue with this domain for a while, turned on the Auto-renew option as well.

Email Forwarding

Once I had the site, I started with setting up email forwarding. One of the nice things about your domain being registered with Google compared to others is that you receive anything sent to @yourdomain through the wildcard(*) alias. If I wanted to start setting up contacts, I'm not limited to picking just a couple addresses that someone gets right, but anything that the user chooses will be forwarded to me. We'll see if I come to regret that, but given how many emails go to my email that get extra punctuation, I think this will pay off.

I've already proven to myself how writing this might have been useful when I first got this set up as I had lost the link to where I figured out how set this stuff up.
Email Forwarding with Google Domain Servers.

Getting Started with Ghost Pro

After I had the email address forwarding working, I started looking into using Ghost Pro for a hosted site. They already have a helpful guide for getting started using a custom domain.

There is also one for setting up Cloudflare and getting SSL set up everywhere, although at this time I haven't been able to get that working as expected. The guides seem simple enough to follow, but it seems like there may be an issue with Cloudflare issuing new certs. Or the error is behind the keyboard. Either way, at some point I hope to have SSL running everywhere on this blog.