This Website Got Off to a Rocky Start

The excitement I felt as I signed up for my brand new Ghost powered website came crashing down as I almost immediately hit a wall. I had signed up for the 14 day trial, picked a theme, bought a domain, tied the domain to my site, and was all ready to start migrating content over from an old site when a bug on the homepage made my progress train come to a grinding halt. No matter what I did, the homepage was stuck in the same state it was when I started. I added a new post, tried changing the theme, tried updating the navigation, but the homepage remained the same while the rest of the site ran smoothly.

After a few hours troubleshooting on my own, I contacted Ghost's support staff, who are very wonderful, very nice people. They tried everything they could think of on their end, but they were as stumped as I was. Nothing we tried on either end was working, and it went on like this for several days. 3 or 4 days of my free trial passed by with a broken homepage and no way to reliably publish content for site visitors to access.

I must admit, I was tempted to give up at this point. As a software developer, there are many other options for me for building a new website. However, I really wanted the many great features Ghost provides, such as the built in membership and newsletter functionality. I decided to keep trying, and that's when I made the breakthrough.

As I thought about how only the homepage was broken and the rest of the site worked perfectly, I realized there must be something wrong with the homepage url. I tried tying a different domain to the site, and low and behold, the homepage started working! I switched the domain back, this time using a different subdomain (blog instead of www). Once again, the homepage worked. Since I didn't want my site to be blog.creadevlabs.com, I set the domain up on the root domain (creadevlabs.com instead of www.creadevlabs.com), and I was good to go!

Reflecting on this experience, a question came to mind: how often do we get excited about something new only to run into obstacles and have that excitement crushed. How often do we give up when this happens? I know for myself that it's far easier to mindlessly cruise around on YouTube than it is to solve DNS issues.

How often do we miss out on great opportunities because we hit a small bump in the road? What regrets are we creating for our future selves?

It's still early days for me here on CreaDev Labs, so I don't yet know the full impact of my decision to stick with Ghost . What I do know is that by continuing to work through the DNS issue, I now know more about the Ghost admin and DNS records than I would've known otherwise. I have learned and grown because of my decision and subsequent experience, and am that much better for it.

The next time you're excited about something new and run into an obstacle, don't give up. Success or failure, your future self will be improved from the effort.