 Hello and welcome to session two of newsletters with ghost. I'm Taylor. This is pilot. Hey pilot How's it going? It's going pretty good. I am it's as we're recording this. It's a Friday afternoon. It's I'm gesturing my toy at my window cuz it's Sunday, but it I don't know if it's sunny by you It could be different there It's not sunny here It's sunny here. And and but we're here to talk about ghost some more today. So last session we talked about sort of We basically made the case like why use something like ghost for newsletters Why should you take ownership take control of that platform why we like it at reclaim Specifically because it's not the only self-hostable tool you could use for newsletters Obviously wordpress would be the other one wordpress plus some plugins basically And so we talked about why we really like ghost and think it's an elegant and honestly very inexpensive solution I don't know that we really got into the cost stuff But a lot of the newsletter plugins that you would need for wordpress have limit or subscriptions Yeah, there's subscription fees of some kind not all of them, but but many of them are like that Ghosts if you self-host it, you're really only paying for two things you're paying for the the server space right the hosting cost and On reclaim cloud. That's basically between 10 and 15 dollars. It's not very much money per month That's what we're seeing in terms of usage We're not gonna go really far into everything you can do in reclaim cloud today But we will install it and as part of that I'll kind of point out like oh And this is where you could look at that costs and and have a good idea of that There won't be any cost data because we're gonna install it on stream That is true But I'll show where you can you can look at that information basically And then the other thing That has a cost associated here is for the use of mailgun So mailgun is a separate service that ghost uses to send its emails So this is really important if you've ever done anything with email delivery in the self-hostable world It's kind of a nightmare. Honestly, it's it's not fun and that's honestly for some very good reasons so basically If you want to spin up a server and like have install some program on there that sends out email By default a lot of that stuff is gonna go to spam or in some cases if you don't do the right DNS work It's not even gonna get delivered But these are kind of more recent changes that have been happening with Google and Yahoo Emails, but they they have some restrictions on like look if you don't have this these types of DNS records set up for your domain We're just gonna throw the email out. We're not even gonna put it in spam. We're just gonna not deliver it and Mailgun basically takes care of all that for you and while you can, you know, send the email For like password resets on WordPress sites and Omega sites if you're hosting them with us and reclaim hosting The minute you send a large amount of email those services ramp up the rules even more So for the purposes of a newsletter some type of external email service is a requirement It's it's not really feasible to use Your own server or really even one of ours for large amounts of email to go out You're gonna get spam. You're gonna be blocked by spam filters very quickly. Yeah mail done gets around that basically Yeah, and in addition to that shared hosting servers really aren't Because they're shared they're really not built to send out large amounts of email from like one particular account Yeah, in fact, we don't even let you because we don't want our we don't want our servers to get blocked We have rate limits on how many emails you can send out in an hour so that It doesn't affect everybody who's using that particular server and this also applies to domain of one's own as well, so Yeah, so basically you need to use an external service for this type of stuff and Mailgun is a really good one Well, we will get in we're gonna Configure a domain in Mailgun from scratch today but Mailgun has they have some like enterprise prices listed on their website, but basically you'll just need to start an account for free and You will use their pay-as-you-go plan and the way it works is they charge you like a very tiny amount Per email. I don't actually remember what it is off the top of my head, but it's it's minuscule And then they don't send invoices they don't charge you unless you Use more than like one dollar a month And so that kind of equates to about about 600 to a thousand emails a month. I've actually read different different things Yeah, per month. So so for most people you're not gonna hit this limit at all If you have a newsletter that grows Your costs are probably gonna be one to two to three dollars a month. We're not talking very much money here if you also goes to frequency like how often do you send out your newsletter true yep, that's very true, you know Like we we definitely hit those here at reclaim like we have enough people and we use multiple Newsletters and stuff like that, but we're a business. So for the charge for For reliable email delivery for like what is essentially a couple dollars a month. It's kind of a no-brainer I think we also didn't hit that threshold for the first couple months of the roundup at least well Yeah, probably not the roundup itself. Although we use mailgun for a lot of things around. Yeah, that's true Yeah, we use it for Almost all of the email that you receive from us So there's plenty of things that we use mailgun for but but my point is mailgun is is a hard problem just sorry email is a hard problem to solve and Mailgun is a really good service to make that easier So We will set that up today too. So I'm gonna we're gonna kick it off because we actually have kind of a lot to do We wanted to cram all of the like weird technical stuff into one episode so that people could watch this and get a good sense of it Basically start to finish of what you'd have to do and We're gonna do that right now. So I'm logged into reclaim cloud and So this is this is the really step one is we need to install ghost So you'll make a reclaim cloud account if you didn't know the address is reclaim dot cloud Go set up a banner for you real quick one second. Yeah, and you're just gonna hit log in So I've already logged in of course and Once I've got an account. I'm gonna go to the marketplace and I'm gonna search for ghost And it'll come up here And so a couple things here we're gonna install ghosts, you know via the marketplace, which is our Basically, it's our automated installers for lots of apps When you make a reclaim cloud account if you don't have one already You do get a two week trial. So you can just try this You don't even have to add a payment method if you're a edu email if you don't have a edu email message our support or And and we can we can get your account in our system. We don't take sign-ups from like Gmail addresses But you trial for spam purposes Yeah, so you all you have to do though is put it in an email to us at our support and we'll show you how you can sign up We do take sign-ups from anybody, but but the public form only allows edu emails. So but Yeah, so from here and I should say and so you won't have to add a payment method during that time You can just try things out and see if it works for you So we're gonna go to the marketplace ghost And I'm gonna hit install and I can give my environment a name here This is gonna define the sort of temporary URL that we'll use ghost at before we map a real domain name to it later So I'll just call this my cool newsletter as is sort of my convention You can give it a display name. I'll just leave it at ghost. That's fine. Yeah This display name doesn't really matter. It's really just for your purposes What you want it to look like in the dashboard? And then finally, I'll pick a region. I could pick a lot of regions. I'll go with Canada because why not so hit install And this will take a few minutes So I am going to actually let this hang out right here and While this is installing we'll talk about sort of everything you'll need to make what we're doing today happen So you really only need three things you need a domain name That you're not already using for some other website, of course and this also could be a subdomain by the way This doesn't have to be a top-level domain We are gonna show a top-level domain today but it could also be a subdomain and you I'll talk about where the things would differ but The principal sound yeah, and now that I think about it there really isn't anything that would differ So I'm doing it this way because I've already set up mailgun on my top-level domain in my C-panel account, so I wanted to show this today, so I registered a fresh one But yeah, you'll need a domain name you can register one with us if you have a shared hosting account You can literally go into your cPanel and hit register a new domain I'll show you that in a sec But if you already have one registered somewhere else or you prefer to register your domain with a different registrar That's fine. You don't need to use our domain registration for that I'm of course gonna show ours today because that's what I have access to You will need a reclaim account cloud account, which is what I already said of course And then finally you will need to make a mailgun account which again mailgun accounts are Free and easy to make so literally just go to mailgun.com and hit get started for free so You I do I do believe you need to put a payment method on your mailgun account I don't think they let you sign up without one, but like I said unless you're sending a lot of email It's gonna cost you literally nothing so Yeah, so those are the three things you'll need today and we're gonna walk you through how we set all of this up So let's go check back and reclaim cloud. It looks like it's almost done. It's on its Yeah, this step takes just a few minutes, but there we go So It's not gonna be done for a while immediately. Yeah, your ghost application has been successfully deployed So this is a reclaim cloud letting you know it's saying hey, here's the URL of your ghost site I you can see I clicked on it and it's already it's not quite ready for me here But if I refresh there it is. Yes, what it looks like And if I go back here, it says hey if you want to change the domain name You'll need to point an a record at this IP address and then use a domain configuration add-on We're gonna do that in a little bit here and then I Can set up ghost by visiting this URL Let's actually do that to make my account because I don't have a way to log in yet So I'll give it a site title. I'm gonna call it my cool newsletter This is a very important step if you are setting up ghost do this immediately Yeah, you want to do this because if you're not the first person to happen to visit this URL someone else could set it up now Is that likely? Probably not because no one knows about it But just a good thing to keep in mind that you do have to set a password here. So, yeah I'm gonna use my reclaim email address and Set a password here. I don't think yeah, it's not gonna show it on screen. Cool. Nope. I need to set a Longer password Great. So I am now logged in now We're we'll return to ghost later, but I just wanted to make sure that I set a password Okay, so the next things we got to do here is we need to set up that Domain name, right? We don't we probably don't want our domain. Sorry our newsletter at, you know Reclaim.cloud you want to really for all the reasons we were talking about last time You also want to own the domain name that's attached to this thing in terms of ownership here That's gonna be important. So I'm gonna go to my cPanel account to do this I have already registered a domain name, but in In the case that you haven't you can just go to domains register top-level domain and follow the instructions here so you can Point a domain you've registered elsewhere if you want but otherwise you can click this button and it will take you out to our website where you can Pick out your domain name and and all that stuff And then you'll need to add it to cPanel. So basically I'll click here to go to the domain section of cPanel and I would hit create a new domain and I would type in whatever That domain name is here. I probably want to uncheck share document root Yeah, that's a great domain and then submit and what that's going to do if you register domain with us That's going to tell our system. Oh Let's attach that domain name to this cPanel account, which lets us do DNS stuff with it basically Again, I've already done that. So I'm actually not gonna hit submit here and if I go to my DNS zone editor I You can see I've got a handful of domain too many Domains in here not enough and my cool newsletter calm That's the domain. I registered for this today and if I go to manage there's a ton of Records in here already and that's because I added this to cPanel and what I'm gonna want to do is change the a record because It's already set up to go to my reclaim hosting cPanel I want to change it because I want to have it go to to ghost instead So I'm gonna hit edit here basically Saying look here for information about this domain and then when you go look here It says actually go to this specific other place Yeah, and it says if you want to change the main name point in a record at that IP So I'm gonna copy that by the way, you'll get a copy of this emailed to you too So if you dismiss this it's not gone forever and I'm gonna go here paste in that IP it gave me and hit save And theoretically you could do zone records like mail and DKM and SPF and all those types of things in here But Milgan's gonna let you not do that instead Yeah, yeah Milgan's gonna tell me what we need to do here basically Milgan's really great about walking us through this process Just like this is trying to do the same. The other thing I'll mention here is we have a guide here Covering a lot of the things we're gonna talk about today. So if you click on this, it'll take you out now Now I have this open twice, of course All right And it'll talk about how to install ghost how to set up your account in ghost how to do some things like update ghost later and set up mail and Change domain name which we're gonna do in just a second all kinds of things are available here Which is gonna be handy for for you. So Okay, so I Can close this now and now that I've mapped that domain name in DNS. Let me double-check did I hit submit? Yes, I did. Yep. That's the name I'm gonna copy this domain name again Now I just need to tell ghost what domain name. It's gonna be Expecting basically so I'm gonna hit this add-on button here under the environment for my ghost This little bit smaller And I'm gonna hit domain configuration and change and That says hey, please specify the new domain name should already have an a record pointed there Which is what we just did. Whoops. I put the wrong thing in there. So that's my cool news letter comm I'm I gotta say I'm shocked that my cool newsletter comm was not already registered. I know I am shocked I'm keeping this. I don't have newsletter content But I think I need to come up with something so Yeah What it this is what is the world coming to that such Com of all things like like like like my cool newsletter. Ninja sure I go through I look up the list of Domain extensions and it always makes me laugh, you know, you can get dot. Yeah, I Did not know that but it makes sense. I I don't know if I have it right now But I at one point I had Jaden coffee and I was like, I guess I need to start roasting coffee beans now like And I never did and I think I let it lapse but yeah, there's so many amazing top-level domain names All right, so I've done the domain configuration now Like I said, this is gonna tell ghost. Hey, you are at this new domain name now It's also going to issue a let's encrypt cert. So I am going to go to the new URL Michael newsletter comm and there we go fast. It put the cert on real quick It does it immediately when you tell it to apply. It's going to instantly Restart ghost and issue a search. So I'm Yeah, and by immediately I mean it takes like 30 seconds, but we were talking so It finished and now let's log back into ghost. Just make sure that's working still. So And there we go. So I'm in ghost So from here was we've mapped a domain we've installed ghost we've mapped the domain name now comes the Mail gun stuff. So I've already got mail gun open and I'm signed in over here in this tab And I am already using mail. Well, I don't actually use mail gun much In fact, you can see that I've sent zero email in the last month via mail gun or yeah in the last month But I do have it to kind of mess around with it set up on a domain already So I'm gonna need to set up another domain in mail gun But the instructions are gonna be the same even if this is your first one So I'm gonna go to sending and then hit add new domain And then I'm gonna put my domain name in there, which is of course my cool newsletter calm And it's gonna ask what region so if you want your email to be sent from the EU you can select that Otherwise, it's us. Those are really the only two regions. They have So you have to pick one and then you just you can leave the IP assignment. There's only one option anyway so and Then I'll hit add domain Okay, and so it's gonna say hey, you need to verify your DNM your domain So go to your DNS provider to that you use to manage my cool newsletter calm and add the following DNS records, so we're gonna need to Put in an SPF record. In fact, there probably is one already, but we're gonna have to modify it we're gonna need to put in a dekin dekin record and Mx records and a C name record so all of this we're gonna have to put in so I am going to Go back to my DNA of my C panel here and Actually, I should copy this so it says hey, you need an SPF record for my cool newsletter calm I'm gonna copy this value here and Then I'm actually just gonna find one in the list that's already here and edit it and that you can see here is an SPF record And so I'm gonna actually edit this paste it in We're gonna do dekin next and as you can see here it actually there's a dekin already as well. Yeah So I'll do the same thing So it says hey, you need to do dekin record. I am going to hit copy there Oh and actually I'm realizing I think it's a little bit different. So it's smtp.domainkey Yeah, that's the same. So alright, so I'm actually gonna leave the the one that's there alone So let me let me do this so The annoying thing about dekin and and all this stuff is it says hey make this record But it actually doesn't really give you a lot of instructions on what these are. These are all text records there are Many different types of DNS records the main ones you see are a which is for IP addresses mx which is for Receiving email We're talking about sending email right now C name which is you can kind of think of it like redirects from one domain to another sort of And text records which are used for all kinds of things. So I'm gonna make a new text record for my dekin and I'm gonna paste in the the The host name that it gave me here and I'm going to now copy this enter this value part Put that in on the record side And there you go Okay, so that one's in now too And then I'm gonna have to put in mx records. So These so these are these probably exist as well. So I could go in here and that's definitely Yeah, so I'm gonna go in and change this one. I think you can keep priority though. Oh Yeah, it's actually says the priority should be 10 I actually am not a hundred percent sure that that matters But I'm gonna I'm gonna follow their advice. Yeah, they're the they're the experts. Yes, certainly So that's one mx record, but I need to make two so I am also going to go in and Copy this one and I'm gonna go to the top again and make the mx record like this and This one also it said to put in 10 and the domain name on the other side Yeah, and I think that changing the priority on that so for modifying the one that already exists I think changing the priority matters just so that they're not like competing with each other So that they're same priority I think in this case because they're given the same priority they're actually are competing It's sort of like oh you can just try whichever one basically and mail gun wants you to do that for the purposes of Like load balancing on their servers. Okay, I I don't know that for sure by the way But that's my understanding is if you have DNS records with the same priority your It depends on the system and by the system. We're talking like your operating system And all these things but they will basically choose at random. They'll be like cool a or b But of course nothing is random and computing. So anyway So anyway, I just I just don't understand email, but yeah, it's all right Me neither. All right, and then the final one is You there is a tracking component email gun where it can keep track of who's opened emails And who's hit unsubscribe links and things like that. You don't actually have to set this up We will for the purposes of this but It says hey, why don't you set up a new sub host name called the email dot my cool newsletter comm and Put a C name to mail gun org. So we'll do that So I'm gonna do a C name I'm gonna paste in the host name. I'm gonna go back here grab the value This is a lot easier by the way if you actually open these things side-by-side but for the purposes of recording I didn't want to do it that way. Yeah, but I would recommend just open these things next to each other Okay So now this is Whoops, so I'm gonna be completely transparent and honest with everyone here We may have to do some editing magic because sometimes DNS records take time to propagate So I'm going to hit submit on this But it's very possible that We'll see we'll have to wait. Yeah, so it better not be 24 to 48 hours because as you said we are recording on this on a Friday So well, we can always come back and look at it later, too. That's true So it looks like these are all verified. This one says ready to activate I'm not actually a hundred percent sure this Okay, so Okay, so I can activate this one by hitting Yeah, this feels exactly like, you know, 15 minutes ago. We were like, oh wait. No, that's weird Fresh like 15 minutes ago. We were like, oh, you know ghost isn't gonna be ready yet and then it immediately became ready Yeah, you know The DNS can take a little while Okay, so I'm not really sure what was up with them with mail gun on there With that refresh error, but I'm gonna go back to domain settings and then DNS records And we are all set now. So we've got Yes, so we've got SPF de kim mx and C name all set up here now we are gonna need two more things So and I'm gonna say if you're watching this, I know like the the mail setup is Kind of a pain here But this the nice thing about this is something you really like to do once and then it's done and mail gun does walk you through All of it. So and it's it's also we've been doing this for probably 20 minutes of this But infinitely better than just being in a You know longer spiral of emails not working. Why isn't it working? How do I make it work? Which is what happens? Later if you skip all these steps Yep. All right. So finally, we're gonna also need to go to SMTP credentials and So there there are SMTP credentials here already And we can either reset these I'm actually gonna make new ones for the purposes of using ghost in particular So I'm gonna hit add new and it's gonna say cool. What do you want the login? Slash email address to be and how do you want to create the password? And so I'm gonna call this one I Don't know it could be whatever you want here. It could be newsletter. It could be ghosts I'm gonna put ghost in for the login And then I'll let it do the creation method automatically. It's just gonna generate a password for me It says hey a new password has been created for ghost at my cool newsletter calm click copy So I'm gonna do that and I'm actually gonna go over to my notes over here. We're gonna copy this long long Password it generated don't worry. I will Sorry get rid of too many tabs open Don't worry. I will Get rid of this by the time you're watching this. I'm also gonna grab the login and The last things we'll need here is it's we're gonna need this SMTP address and then the port 25 things like that So, yeah, I might as well I guess 25 Great So now we need to tell Oh, I'm missing one more step. Okay, that's SMTP That's the credentials that ghost is going to use to send things like password resets and those types of emails Finally, we have to make an API key and mail gun and this is what ghost is going to use to send your actual newsletters out There is a entire Blog post they have which of course I literally just closed for some reason there we go about The difference between these things I will link to this in in discord But if you're curious about like, why do I have to set up? Well, first of all, like, why do I have to use mail gun and ghost explains why that basically? That's what they support for newsletter stuff And they actually go in and technically details of like, oh well Do I have to use mail gun for things that aren't newsletters like password resets and the answer to that is no You can use any SMTP service Well, I in my opinion and our opinion at reclaim is if you're gonna set up a newsletter and therefore need to use mail gun You might as well use the same email service for your password reset type emails as well That's called transactional email is those one to one very low volume Type emails and bulk emails are I'm sending out my newsletter to everybody kind of stuff Okay, so finally, let's create that API key that we're gonna need and So I went to sending API keys again. This is under sending domain settings and I Let's call this my cool newsletter comm Give it that description It's gonna say great. Here's your API key. It's it's only in display at once So you may need to make sure to copy this I'm also gonna grab this and And label that one. Yeah. Oh Interesting it. Oh, it's not the same. I was gonna say it's the same. It just it's similar Yeah, it's structure. Yeah. All right. It was like that's weird. Why would it be the same? All right? So I get it done here And by the way, if you ever do if you forget to copy it or lose it for some reason You can only just delete this and create a new one or you can create as many as you want I believe so you can use them for all kinds of things here. Alright, so now we need to go through and set up the actual Ghost part so we're we're done setting up the mail gun account kind of thing so I'm gonna go back to my reclaimed cloud dashboard and I'm gonna use the add-ons and I already have it open But for the purposes of watching this I'm gonna do this again The add-ons here are little like scripts and helpers that we make And you can find them by clicking on this little icon here under your environment. You made a bunch of them I mean to be clear, we didn't make all of them Some of them are made by virtuoso the company that makes this platform that is reclaimed cloud But I've made a few of them all of these ghost ones. I've made so yes You also made the ghost installer. Yes. Yeah And I'm pretty proud of it because we do really want The ghost installer itself is I think pretty simple to use. It's it's literally a single click so and Before that it was not It used to be kind of hard to get ghost working on our platforms before this so I will mention here too. We're not gonna use it today, but you can also update ghosts So if you're on, you know some older version you install it a few months ago And you want to update it literally just hit that update button and it will get you up to date We just installed it so no need to run updates right now. But yeah okay, so I'm gonna go in here and go to mail setup and It's gonna have a handful of little settings here This is a good time to check out that article because we have all of these laid out for you So you're gonna use the from address and the Username password from mail gun these are actually gonna be the same And then you can set a port and SMTP and all that kind of stuff and the host so I'm gonna go back to where I kept track of some of the stuff. This is my login and from address So I'm gonna put this in here. Sorry username and from address I'm gonna get my password I'm gonna get my host which is SMTP dot mail gun org and I'm gonna get my port which was just 25 but If I go back to this tab here They were you can you can choose, you know, is there any particular benefit or distinction to picking one of the other two or not not that I'm aware of there is Um There there could be reasons on different server setups Why you may want to use a different port? But on reclaim cloud if you're falling along with our instructions, it doesn't there's no reason to use One over the other so That's good, and then we're gonna put in SMTP and Whoops and SMTP again, and I'm gonna hit apply It is going to basically input those settings into ghost and then restart ghost great so now I have basically the Password the transactional email not newsletter email, but transactional email is now set up so I can go to my cool newsletter comm slash ghost and I could log out and And you know Set up my actual like do a password reset things like that. Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna get there in a second I don't want to do that just yet because I also want to set up my newsletter email while we're in here basically So for setting up the newsletter email once you sign back into ghost and In case you forgot it's basically whatever Domain name you have slash ghost. That's the URL to log in You're gonna go down here at the bottom. Let me zoom in to this settings icon and Over on the sidebar We're gonna go all the way down to the email newsletter section and then mail gun settings and says hey the mail gun API is Used for bulk email newsletter delivery And if you click this why is this required by the way, this gets you to that article And so I can hit edit and I'm gonna go in here and pick my mail gun region Which for the domain I set up is us and the the mail gun domain again, so this is The this domain up here is where it is. So my cool newsletter comm and then finally I'm gonna get that API key Created, so let me copy that too and hit save and it says great mail gun is set up So That's it. That's all of the steps Yeah, that is absolutely all of the steps that we need to To set up for getting all of this stuff configured Now we are actually going to log into ghost and and do things with it, you know, look at themes look at how do I set up? Subscribers how do I write posts all of that kind of stuff? I'm gonna do next time but Really wanted to have a dedicated sort of technical setup Video so I'm gonna be honest pilot this went smoother than I expected and this went faster than I expected So we're gonna we're gonna have this recession in it just under 40 minutes, which is actually kind of cool And if but if you have any questions or or challenges with any of this, you know Definitely post in the discord because we can Help you work through them and hopefully other folks can learn from whatever questions you have because there is a lot of moving parts here and of course we demonstrated one way to do this in terms of Hosting ghost on reekling cloud and using cPanel for your domain name But if you're using a different DNS tool, maybe you've registered your domain with like namecheap or somebody If you're gonna look a little bit different, right? Yeah, if for example, you registered my cool newsletter dot yacht You did not do it through reclaim and so you're gonna have to do that somewhere else. Yeah, I mean hop on that because That sounds like a lucrative newsletter by the way I Do not think it would be cost effective just from domain registration costs alone. I don't remember I remember looking up dot boat and there's no reason why dot boat and dot yacht would have the same Pricing but dot boat was like $10,000 a year. Oh my god. Well now I need to find out Welcome to Namecheap doesn't like that. Yeah, try dot boat try dot boat Welcome to our well in not every register register our supports all of these it could just be that namecheap doesn't do that particular one But whatever it's fine I wouldn't be surprised though. Like you said a lot of the most Weird fanciest ones are pretty expensive. So yeah, yeah But you know yacht enthusiasts, maybe you could charge for your newsletter I don't know. I assume yacht people have lots of money, right? So Anyway, um I I hope this was helpful in getting kind of a good start to finish overview of how do I register domain? map a domain install ghost in uh setup mail gun Do the dns stuff with mail gun? Um, and uh, we'll see everyone next time See you next time. Bye