Welcome Back

Welcome back to the Southland Blog. Its been a while since I had an outlet to express my thoughts on things I think about. Since I've ended all of my other creative outlets (I'm sure I don't do anything I have listed at https://redfoxx15.com anymore), I've decided to pick a blog back up.

I'm a fan of telling people what I think and I really like running my own service to tell people what I think. I also like to try out things that are not quite mainstream. Typically something like this would be serviced by Wordpress but I like to be difficult. I'm running Ghost as my blog and using Obsidian (via plugin) to write, format and track my articles.

Why Ghost?

Ghost is an open source content management system focused on publishing. It has an option for sending out newsletters and a built in subscription system for tiered paywalls (if I were so inclined).

Why Obsidian?

Obsidian is a simple knowledge management/note taking app that is local first so everything is stored on device instead of in the cloud where I may not have access to it if internet is not available. It also uses simple Markdown for formatting so I don't have to stress over hitting keyboard shortcuts and highlighting then changing things. Finally its fairly universal so it doesn't matter if I'm on Linux, MacOS or Windows, I still have my editor and (if I am syncing my files properly) files available.

Why did I choose this combination?

It all started when I was a guest writer for Table of Content (RIP TableOC). Since I wasn't the owner of the server, I wrote my articles in a local editor (either Pages or Word) and then copied them into Wordpress and made formatting adjustments as needed. I really liked keeping my word despite whether the service was still up or not. Swapping to Obsidian and Ghost allows me to continue to doing that while doing all the work in Obsidian without having to move text and reformat since both tools rely on markdown for formatting. This allows me to write and format it once, hit the publish button and go on about my day.

Hopefully this will be the first of many posts over 2026 and I don't get bored and delete the server. Happy New Year everyone. Thanks for dropping by.