Perceptible Incompetence

It's been a while since I set up much of anything online. My old-school blog from 2006-2011 started as a blogger account that migrated to a hosted plan from a provider I won't mention. Their advertising became what I, as a mother of daughters and aunt of nieces, consider offensive and sexist. I may have briefly went there but, it wasn't where I wanted to Go after that. I did keep my blog privately on a free WordPress site. I enjoy reading it as a little slice of my past. I might bring snippets from that here, or I might not. I haven't decided yet. With that in mind, let me get to why this post is named Perceptible Incompetence.

Basically, I wanted to set up a new website, a tiny speck of real in a web of links that have been monetized and advertised beyond sensible limits. It was part nostalgia and part middle finger to the algorithms that rule our online lives. So, as any good digital novice sitting in front of a screen in her nightgown at 2am would do, I asked my AI buddy Claude how to do this. After some discussion I ended up here:

I need some instructions and suggestions. I want to set up a subdomain for my main domain perceptibility.net it will be chaos.perceptibilty.net. I'm currently registered at porkbun.com. I'm deciding between using ghost.io or wordpress.com to use the subdomain for a personal, low (no haha) traffic blog. What do you think is the best way to do this that factors in security, ease of use, and price?

I was given the pros and cons of each site, how to set up a sub domain, and a small note that made me giggle:

One small note: you wrote chaos.perceptibilty.net in your message (missing the 'i') — just double-check the spelling when you're entering it in Porkbun and Ghost so everything matches perceptibility.net. 😄

Claude keeps me on track! My next message was a bit dramatic:

incompetent should be my subdomain. lol. That didn't work out and now I can't access anything. I sent a message to support to delete everything.

Claude understood:

Ha! incompetent.perceptibility.net — honestly a strong choice for a personal blog, very on-brand for the chaos aesthetic you were going for.

DNS misconfiguration is a rite of passage. The most common culprit is a CNAME pointing to the wrong value, or a conflicting existing record that was already there for that host. Porkbun support is pretty responsive, so they should be able to clean it up quickly.

After several attempts to fix it myself I responded:

I started the support email with the subject: Cancel ghost Pro Subscription because I'm incompetent. Hahaha. Someone is probably looking at that and laughing right now. I hope so at least

I start to spiral desperately reading support documentation:

It says I need an A record with an @ and an IP address. Okay, what ip address? I can't get an IP address if I don't have a site and why an @ None of this makes sense

Claude had my back:

That instruction is for a completely different use case — it's for people hosting their own server. You can ignore it entirely. You're using Ghost(Pro), which means Ghost hosts everything, and a CNAME is exactly right for what you're doing. You do not need an A record or an IP address.

The @ symbol just means "the root domain" (perceptibility.net with nothing in front of it). It has nothing to do with your subdomain setup.

So whoever wrote the instructions you're reading right now is not talking to you. That's the maddening thing about DNS documentation — it covers every possible scenario in one place and doesn't always tell you which scenario applies to you.

I then went through a list of troubleshooting steps. This included dnschecker and my response:

it shows perceptible-chaos.ghost.io all over the world

I contemplate why Russia could see my site but I couldn't. I have a small emotional meltdown and tell claude I thought maybe I did need an A DNS record. I'm firmly instructed to wait for support:

Hang tight on the support email. Ghost is small enough that response times are usually pretty good. There's a decent chance someone sees your ticket tomorrow morning and fixes it in 60 seconds.

And hey — at least the email subject line was good. 😄 Either way, blog.perceptibility.net (or incompetent. 😄) is still happening. Just slightly delayed

We have a small intervention chat and things get put into perspective:

Okay that genuinely made me laugh. The most haunted URL on the internet. A digital monument to DNS suffering.

We have an instructional talk about how DNS really worked instead of how people think it works. Then we conclude with:

Okay, that makes much more sense now. porkbun record is a detour sign and ghost is the traffic light that lets people on the correct chaos highway lol. I couldn't figure out why two dns records were needed. So the ghost record is internal?

It would have been a lot clearer if they just said, what's your subdomain that we need to connect to your blog. Cool, you do own that subdomain, connected, have a good day.

I'm sure Claude is probably thinking, Finally! She gets it but, is polite about it.

Right?! That's literally all it is. Instead they hand you a table of record types and IP addresses and CNAME values and root domains and www redirects and you're supposed to figure out which of the four scenarios applies to you.

"What subdomain do you want? Got it, verified, done." — that's a two minute onboarding flow. What they have is a documentation maze that sends people to Porkbun knowledge base articles about placeholder IP addresses at 127.0.0.1.

The gap between what the technology actually does and how it gets explained to normal humans is enormous and nobody seems bothered by it. You figured out the underlying concept just fine — detour sign and traffic light is a genuinely accurate mental model. The docs just never gave you the chance to get there cleanly.

Anyway — you have a working blog, a great first post idea, and a much clearer understanding of how DNS actually works than most people ever get. Today redeemed itself a little. 😄

Happy with my success I type a quick note:

The title will be Perceptible(my screen name) Incompetence 😄

Claude doesn't fail me with a perfect humorous response:

Perfect. 👏

SEO optimized for anyone googling "how do I set up a Ghost blog without losing my mind" and relatable enough that those twelve readers will feel deeply seen.

Make sure you tag it #dns #ghost #incompetent and #detour-signs 😄

Incompetence indeed. But, it's working now, I think. So, moving on. First post completed somewhat competently.