Switching Blogging Platforms & Hosting in Windows Azure

Recently I decided to switch from my custom built MVC3 solution (which I developed while in College as a side project) to Ghost Blogging platform. This is largely due to the amount of effort it previously took for me to publish using my old platform. With writing another website and updating my previous one towards the bottom of my list of priorities right now, I wanted something quick and easy to setup and publish with.

Setting it up in Azure

Getting Ghost up and running is easier than ever now with Windows Azure. If you want a more advanced setup with Git integration you can follow Scott Hanselman's Instructions over on his blog. However, at this time I have no intentions of modifying the source other than maybe a few CSS tweaks so I went with the quick setup route.

Start off by navigating to your azure management portal. From there go to a new web site from template and select Ghost Blog.

After that Azure will take a couple minutes to setup your site for you. Once it's finished you can navigate to yoursite.azurewebsites.net/ghost to setup your account. After setting up my account I was easily able to create new posts and paste the HTML from my old blog with very little tweaks to get it working. Check out these instructions on how to setup a custom DNS entry in Windows Azure.

Good luck and happy blogging!