 Hi folks. Morning, Mandan and Pilots. Hi. Good day to anyone who it's not morning there, I guess. Just covering all our bases. Yeah, you know, I want to be time inclusive. I guess. So it's been a busy couple of weeks at Reclaim. You know, started the semester for a lot of schools. I think a lot of folks are busy right now. How are you all doing? Yes. Yes. You are. You are doing. Yes. Pretty much. It's going. Actually. Yes. No, it's, it's going pretty well. There's a bunch of stuff that I'm running a little behind on. If anyone has, who's watching has sent me emails in the past couple of days, you may have received an automatic response that says, it's the end of the month. You'll hear from me in a week. Because it's the end of the month. I'll hear from you a little bit. Very, very considerate of you to send those out because for me, it's just like, oh my God, it's been a week. I'm sorry. I meant to reply. Well, it's, it's actually sort of on topic because it's something that I started doing. Maybe not a year ago, but it's something I started doing a while ago. Because of the roundup because the last week, the month is for me, the time of let's focus on the roundup. And so I started putting out that auto responder so that I didn't have to stress like the idea of if you are expecting something from me, I might get back to you. I might have time, but if you don't hear back from me, here's two other places you can send this and someone else will get back to you. See, it's a sliding scale of considerateness. Yeah. You have an automation setup to make sure everyone receives that message. Amanda apologizes and I just don't respond to email very quickly. So sometimes I apologize. But so, yeah, you know, it's like, it's not an end of the month thing. I just, I just, I just typically check in on email once a day and sometimes I don't get back to things in a couple of days. So I think for me too, and we will move on, but like I don't just check email once a day. I have my email open pretty much all day. And then I just see things come in and I'm like, Oh no, I can't respond to that right now. And then I just feel that stress all day. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's open. I can see the number. But I don't spend time on it more than usually unless, unless I have a lot of it to get through. Right. But I do a frankly insane thing, which is that I have a recurring task every day in a sauna that is just email inventory where at the start of the day I go through my inbox and I write down all of the people that I have to respond to. And then that's what I work off of. And if your email is not in that list, then I'll get to it tomorrow. I could not live my life that way pilot. Frequently, I don't actually do that, but that's what that's for. Might be throwing our hand a little bit with that. We can't all be pilot. That's the thing. No, there can only be one. Yes. I'm not setting up weird and redundant systems. Who am I? Cool. So, so, uh, well, I'm glad we're all, you know, hanging in there. Um, and, um, today's stream, we wanted to talk about kind of kind of look back on. Well, it's interesting. So, uh, we're going to be looking at ghost and newsletters and ghost. We've had a flex course on this before. Um, it was almost a year and a half ago at this point. Oh, no. Yeah. Hurts my brain. Um, so we're going to kind of revisit some of it. We're going to kind of fully set up ghost. Um, and just a little, um, demo newsletter. Um, we're also going to talk about this. The context for this is two things. Um, really one thing, but kind of two things. The main context I think is. Hey, it's been a bit. And we think it's worth revisiting cause we're using this tool even more than we were a year and a half ago. Um, for various things that reclaim. So we'll talk about that a little bit. And so much so that we're actually going to rerun, uh, sort of updated version of this flex course later in the spring. We just put it on the calendar. It just was announced in the roundup. Um, and so that we're really excited to kind of do a, a more in depth revisit of ghost today is going to be a little bit more, how are we using it? Reclaim some technical refreshers. And then also talking about the second thing, which is, you know, we're, we're, um, if, if, uh, folks who are watching this, you know, around the time we are streaming this, um, sub stack is having a bit of a moment. And sub stack is the, um, proprietary platform that makes it really easy to get started. Um, the newsletter you don't have hope. You don't need to have hosting or anything. Um, it's free to use. Um, for, for free newsletters and for paid stuff, they take, I think a portion of what you make, um, things like that. It's, it's a platform. Um, and sub stack seems, I haven't used it, um, personally, but it does seem to be a, you know, a nice, easy to use tool. Um, but they're having a whole, uh, breakdown with content moderate moderation right now, which is kind of the same story we've seen. I don't know since social media started, maybe probably before that, that's as long as I've been paying attention is, is like social media stuff, but I'm sure content moderation and topics around it have been a topic of the internet since, you know, at least the web, I have to imagine, but. I mean, just look at the chance. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Um, so we kind of wanted to sort of, we felt like it was a good, you know, timely thing in that context of like, look, you know, just as a reminder, and we're not, we're not going to, we're not going to lecture anyone here too much, but I'm going to take 30 seconds. Um, and say, like, just as a reminder, like when you, when you use open tools that you can self host and you can, and we hope you self host them with us, but there are other choices. That's the whole point, right? You can host them other places too. Um, they put the power back in your hands. You don't have to be at the whims of. Substack and who, uh, they will allow on their platform that you don't want to be associated with. Um, so, um, we're going to focus on ghost today because it's probably the most direct. I think, um, open source tool as an alternative to substack. It is a blogging engine. It's a, it's a CMS, but it's very focused on the newsletter experience nowadays. And also the entire, like people can sign up and you can have paid newsletters if you want them. All of that stuff ghost does out of the box. Um, so that's kind of why we're focusing on it as an alternative. And it's really interesting to see other, uh, publications leave substack for ghosts now in some of them are leaving for ghost has their own hosting, um, service that you call ghost pro. Um, it's very much like wordpress.com and wordpress.org. Right. Like you can use. I was going to say that's, it's interesting to me because the idea of saying, well, we don't like substack as a platform because they're hosting our stuff and we don't, and we're not really comfortable with their content moderation policies. You get the choice to say, okay, well ghost is also a hosting platform. I'll go to them and their content moderation policies, or to say, you know, you know, I'm not really interested in using them as a platform, but I do like their, the tool tool. Yeah. And you can change your mind later, which is the really cool thing. It's not, um, you know, substack there, there's actually information out there, um, about like how, what is it like leaving substack, right? Like, and they'll, they'll give you, you know, exports of your subscribers and things like that. But you do have to kind of set everything else up from scratch, like because there's no open version of substack that you can move to. Um, you know, if you're using ghost pro, their hosted service or ghost on reclaim cloud, and you decide you don't want to have a business relationship with, you know, us at reclaim or ghosts, the company, um, you can pick, pick up your ghost site and move it to another host that in, in its entirety and point your DNS and your readers will shouldn't even notice. Um, so that's the, that's the advantage here. Um, this is a little bit of a, you know, don't take my word for it kind of thing. Like again, we, we love working with people. Um, and we love that we have kind of, um, a small but passionate community around some of the stuff we do at reclaim, but like the, when it rubber comes a road, you don't have to take our word for it. You can host these tools anywhere, right? Yeah, that's something that I talk about with clients sometimes is then, cause we also, um, I guess for people who are stumbling upon this, one thing that reclaim does is we work with higher ed institutions to provide hosting platforms that they can then offer to their community. Um, and, uh, sometimes we talk to people who are saying, well, how do I keep my, like as compared to Squarespace or Wix or we get people who are coming to our shared hosting saying, well, why, why should I use WordPress instead of, uh, Squarespace or Wix? And the answer is kind of just, well, if in six months or a year or two years, you decide that you don't like Squarespace or Wix, for whatever reason, you don't have a lot of options to leave. But your option is to start over someplace else. Yeah. And if in six months or a year or two years you decide that you don't like us, then, you know, we'll be sad and we'll miss you, but you can always walk away from us. And that's fine. Easily. And we make our stuff. Yeah. That's the thing. It's, yeah, sure. Use Wix, use Squarespace. It's a great, great tools. Really, really helpful for some people, but you don't own your stuff. Yeah. You just don't. And that's the ability for us. The ability to leave is core to anything. The ability to leave being a good and relatively easy option. Yes. You have the ability to leave Wix and or Squarespace. And if you own your own domain, right? Like if you have a domain name and you've pointed it to those tools, well, that's a little bit better, right? Like that's certainly better in that you can still have the same address and space and you're just now just using a different tool to, you know, make the website. But I would say going even farther, you know, in terms of time investment, maybe money spent on the platform, having something that you actually own and can fully, you know, move someplace else and not change even very much of the content or none of the content. It's just better, you know. So that's also now got me thinking about the idea of hosting on a free subdomain of sub stack, which, you know, we also offer free subdomains. You don't have to purchase a domain to host with us. And I think that's pretty normal for most hosting providers. Just to say, yeah, there's a free option. It's not very normal for most C panel hosting providers to be honest with you, but I'm sure there are some, you know, we can't be the only ones, but it's not that normal for open, you know, platforms. That's odd. Well, but, but I'm thinking about the idea of if you're going in and you're saying, all right, I can get a sub stack domain, but sub stack subdomain for free. Then you do run into the issue of saying, all right, well, how do I take my stuff out and put in ghost? How do I make sure people can find me if I do move to ghost? You can't set up a redirect because it's not yours. Yeah. So that actually, so one thing I wanted to mention before we kind of get into to ghost itself a little bit too is I put in the discord and I'll put these links in again because I have them handy, but a couple of weeks ago was like, hey, is anyone else kind of following the inclusion and to be clear, like I don't think sub stacks going away. I'm sure people will continue using it. Hopefully all the people moving for them will put pressure on them to make content moderation decisions people like, but you're never going to please everybody. That's the whole point. And our argument is you don't need to if you have choices, you know. So anyway, so a couple of examples. Platformer news. Yes. So a couple of examples. The first one here is from platformer, which is a big, big newsletter from Casey Newton, who's been like a tech and platform journalist for various places for a long time. And he went he and I think a small team went independent a while ago. They had been using sub stack and now they're on ghost. And so it's kind of this example is interesting to me because this is a pretty high profile newsletter. A lot of people pay for this. And the content that it covers is tech platforms and content moderation and social media stuff. So it's a big it's a it's a big and well considered and well thought piece on this, the space, basically. Another one I think is interesting is Molly whites has has does amazing work around a lot of different things, but specifically like Web three and cryptocurrency and Molly moved the forget what the actual. Yeah, it's just called citation needed from sub stack to ghost. And the cool thing about this write up is it gives it gets into a lot of the stuff we're talking about here too, including like I like that I'm not on a VC backed platform and all this stuff, but also goes way into the tech to and like all of the specific steps that needed to happen to move kind of seamlessly. And this is actually one thing I really like about Molly's writing is blends that really, really seamlessly. So that's really cool. I'll put that link in discord to. And then this is actually not about someone leaving this is just someone saying like, I'm on ghost and I like it. And I mostly just put this one in because I've been following Matt virtualers blog blog almost as long as I've used RSS. So it's another good I think take on all of this stuff. So yeah, and it also links out to a few other things. So hopefully that kind of gives a quick overview of our current context. I don't know if if many of you have other things to add on on sort of sub stack versus open alternatives before we kind of get into ghost. I mean, I just think and not to beat a dead horse, but it's just kind of like, I think people, it goes back to social media platforms as well where it's just you hold these one, these one platforms, this one tool, this one company, this one person or institution as like, when you give them that much power and you by putting all of your eggs in that basket, it's just kind of like, you're not going to be happy with everything that one one you never could know. Unless it's you. I love about your point Taylor of just like, if you like, you're not going to institutions or organizations are not going to keep everyone happy. They're just not, it's not possible. And it doesn't mean that they're always going to be like morally wrong when they do that. It's just like, people should have the option to just do, do them, you know, and so, and I think that, yeah, we have the option. I'm not saying people don't have that option, but I think that people will be less disappointed when they come to terms with that fact of like, you know, maybe I should just own own my presence and my stuff online. And so that I'm not constantly searching around for who's matching my values right now. It's like, I do. So I'll, I'll do it. Yeah. And it's going to change. And obviously you weigh that to sit. It's a decision you have to make when adopting almost any tool or technology, right? And or I should say it's a decision. I hope people make every time, you know, and it's not always made, I think, but it's something that I think is really important. Sorry. Well, I was just thinking now, even in a very large scale thing, sometimes we talk about digital project life cycle and archival and things like that. And what it means to have an exit strategy or to have an idea of what sunsetting your project will look like. And I'm thinking now about the idea of like, okay. You host on ghost.org and then decide that you don't like them. You move to self hosted ghost where you have more control. And then five years down the line, 10 years down the line, maybe ghost says, hey, we're not developing for this project anymore. It's open source. So people can fork it. And presumably you can pick up and go to the fork if you need to, like there are WordPress forks of like classic press, I think is one there's, there's different forks of people who said, I don't like what the direction that WordPress is going, I don't like that they changed the editor or something. They forked it and they kept developing it. And if you don't like sub stack or wicks or square space, then you one can't leave if you don't like their business practices, but two, if they shut down for whatever reason, maybe the venture capital money runs out, you don't have a way to go. There are no lifeboats even. Yeah. And, and in the, it's just about opening up your options in that way. And you're going to need to weigh these things at every tool or technology you need to adopt, right? Like, and, and we at reclaim, you know, again, our vested interest here just to be, I don't think anyone will be that confused who's watching this, but like our vested interest here is we can host these tools, right? So we want you to, to use open tools because you can host them with us and we try to make it easy to host some of these tools, especially because some of them aren't that easy to host. So, you know, ghost here is a good example. It's not the worst thing to set up in the world, but if you want to set it up from scratch on, on like, say you have a box in a, you know, a machine in your basement, it's, it's, there's kind of a lot to do. Not that I think a lot of people are going to do that, but I'm just trying to illustrate the point of like, you need to set up a database and you need to set up ghost command line tool and you need to set up a reverse proxy for HTTPS and all this stuff. So we're going to talk about how we can make that easy. There are other places that make it easy to just to be completely clear. And I think we may have the easiest one that I've seen, but, but I also haven't tried every single host. So the, the, but it is important to make that, that to evaluate that at every step, right? Like we are talking to you right now in two places, very much on purpose, on YouTube and on a self-hosted peer tube site that we, you know, host and maintain. And we do that. We, you know, we could say, you know, ah, we don't need YouTube at all, but to be perfectly honest with you, that's where people are. So we participate there too, you know, but our, our hedging, our, we're hedging the bed of like, but we do really want to own and control this stuff. So we're going to use, sorry, owncast is our live tool we use for the live stream. And peer tube is the, the archive basically of that. And so we use both. And to be honest, we typically push people to the, our self-hosted ones because we want, we want to kind of keep pushing that boundary experiment, see what it's good at, what it isn't. And now it's kind of the place for us, especially live, right? Where if you're watching right now, I don't well, maybe, maybe pilot Amanda are, but I don't monitor YouTube's chat at all. Like we're not even over there. Typically we are kind of all in on art. It has a chat, but I don't really look at it. It comes through, cause we use stream yard for our streaming. It comes through our comments in here. So we can see it, but we are not on YouTube. Like we're not looking at the YouTube chat. It's just like, if it comes through, you know, that aggregator, we can see it. But yeah. By the way, for posterity, putting up links to our own cast and peer tube in the little subtitle thing. So yeah. And you know, and to be honest, we're going to have a stream too on even just like how we do streams. Like I think probably more than one to be honest, that we can go into more detail. But my point is to say, you know, not at every step of the way do even us always pick the open tool because I think it's important to look at and understand what you may be giving up by not going with an open tool. For instance, while we have, you know, own cast is our open self hosted thing for the live stream. We use discord for the chat. That's not open. Right. We can't host that. We are at the whim of discord, but that is a that is a choice we made because we're because it's a messaging tool. It's complicated. There's a lot of like integrations and things we need. And also we made the bet that maybe people are more likely to keep discord open. Possibly they're using it for other stuff and we want to be part of it. So there are times to make these decisions. We use StreamYard to produce this stream. We also use open tools like OBS. But for us, if we if StreamYard did something terrible business wise for us tomorrow, we could drop them and you all would barely care. Right. Like because we could just use a different tool to produce the video. Right. So the visuals might change a little bit. They would probably look different. But it doesn't have much impact on our ability to make video, to be honest with you. Like we can sub that tool in with something else. So, you know, these these I think it's important to evaluate these things. What you can, what you might lose when you don't have ownership over a tool or how it's, you know, the future of it or and anything like that. And that's it. But it's not always straightforward. Right. Cool. So let's talk about ghosts a little bit. I have the ghost website up. This is the 25 minutes and we're going to talk about ghosts. We'll start talking about ghosts soon. But to be fair, like that's what this stream is about. Right. This stream is about. I mean, it's literally called revisiting ghost and that newsletters amid sub stacks implosion. Right. So we'll have a whole new flex and everything there is still completely relevant, but we are going to update it. And today I wanted to specifically have the conversation we just had. So I'm really glad we did. So, yeah. So this is this is the, you know, the ghost company as a company, their website and talks about the open source tool and they're hosting, they have pricing for it. It's not super cheap to host with them, especially when you look at some of the things that they're offering. So their cheapest one, nine dollars is it limits you to how many members and how many people can sign in and even what themes you can use. It's a little bit like the cheapest WordPress.com things where they kind of put some limits on all that stuff. And yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. But this is sort of what their pricing looks like. I will say if you host ghost and reclaim cloud, we see it in the three to five cloudlets plus a public IP means you're going to pay less than $20 a month, maybe less than $15 a month, depending on how much traffic and how big your site is. So we are between the two cheapest ghost plans. The cool thing though is there's really no limitation to the features. You can have as many users as you want on ghost if you self host it. So we do have a pretty good support article on how to get started with it. And we are going to kind of basically go through this article really quick just to show on video what this looks like. So I did link this in discord too. But basically ghost is pretty easy to get started with on reclaim cloud. So you can go to the marketplace, you sign in and go to the marketplace under content management, ghost is an option in the marketplace as a pre build installer. Then you give it an environment URL. So this is a nice temporary URL before you map a domain name that you can use. And then we are going to pick it up from basically here and I will show the rest of this live. But the article does go on and mention how to set it up and how you can update ghost, how to set up mail, especially handy for both password resets and things, but also newsletters and how to set up a custom domain. So we go through all of that here and we even go into like, hey, if you want to know a little bit about how the under the hood stuff works, you can update ghost manually with these Docker commands if you don't want to use this button. It's a button you can just click on it. I don't know why you would, but I like kind of showing folks how things work when we can make it happen. And anyway, so going over to Reclaim Cloud, I did literally before the stream, just to save us a little bit of time, I hit the button to install it. It does take about five minutes to install ghost, sometimes a little bit less, sometimes a little bit more. So this is what you'll be left with is once it's done, it'll say, cool, here's your new ghost site. You can visit it here. You can set it up here. You can zoom in a little bit and you can point a domain name with this IP and this links out to the article. The reason I can't zoom in is the way this box works. If I zoom in it, oh, never mind. I wasn't saying it's going to go off screen, but I guess that's not true. So, all right, so if I click on this, I can set up ghost and I'm going to do that. I'll call it my neat newsletter. This is one thing I will say about ghost is that you do have to immediately go make your account. Yeah, you do. Technically, most tools like this do work this way, but we can automate around a lot of that. WordPress actually works that way if you install it manually. But I couldn't tell you the last time I installed WordPress manually. So, the problem is the automation here is done by me and I don't have all of the hooks into ghost that we that say install Tront does or reclaim cloud and reclaim press do for WordPress. So, anyway, I can close this. I don't need that anymore. But, oh yeah, I forgot to actually hit the button over here. So I'm going to hit create account and here we go. It kind of gives you a little of what we're doing here. I am going to point to domain. So before I do much more here, I'm actually going to just go check out the homepage. This is what it looks like by default. I'm going to point to domain using my cPanel account. So I should have logged into this ahead of time, but that's okay. And so I'll go to the zone editor. I'm going to do an a record as the instructions tell me I should wait. Did I scroll past it? Did you save your a record? What? No, I didn't do it yet. So oh yeah map a custom domain. So it says you'll likely want to map a custom domain. You don't need you don't need to so a that IP address is emailed to you but also visible at any time. You don't that's just to help people get started. So I also realized that I just said a record is when I met IP address because I'm a parrot. So if I open this little thing here that's the IP address same one that it told me about just just before and I can copy that. I'll make a new a record paste the IP in there and we'll call this my neat news letter . The reason I'm giving it such a long sub domain is I've probably used newsletter.jdn.me like I don't know 30 40 times as I it's when I develop the installer so there may already be a newsletter.jdn.me somewhere in the global DNS system. So for the sake of making this simple I'm going with a rather weird thing. So if I go there right now it's not going to fully work. What was it my neat I don't even remember what I just put in I have to now look amazing. Is it my neat something there it is. Okay. So if I go there right now it's going to be like whoa whoa whoa whoa that doesn't work but we know it's pointed at something because we're getting a page. So now we have to tell ghost about the domain because it doesn't know yet. And go up sorry domain configuration and I can just paste in the domain name that I've set up a DNS record for make sure you don't have any spaces before and after or a period or anything like that and I'll hit apply it'll take a few minutes and depending on how you do things you may have some browser caching situations but yeah it is it is now restarting and setting up the new domain name so if I visit there it's now it's almost ready but it doesn't have a HTTPS search just yet it'll work on that and between when I said that it's already got one so it does the search automatically yeah but it does need like I have to give it like 15 seconds and I'm very impatient so now we are at this new domain name neatnewsletter.jdn.me so that's probably step one is giving your ghost newsletter a domain name but to be perfectly honest you could play around with it just using the Reclaim Cloud URL for a long time you don't have to specifically map a domain to it if you don't really want to the next thing we should do is set up mail and there's actually two things to do here which is this is actually new and it's kind of a bummer but there's now two places to set up Mailgun unfortunately one is used for all of ghost's normal functions which is like password reset emails and stuff like that and the other is used specifically for sending email I think they do it this way to be like more efficient and like with the Mailgun API but it is a little bit weird and it also technically means that you can have like you could use two email services you could use one email service for like password resets and one for your newsletter I don't know why you do that but maybe there's a reason so if we go back to our our set up document here we also have some instructions on how to set up Mailgun so basically we're just going to use this add on and we can put in our details so the first thing we need to do is go to Mailgun so Mailgun accounts are free to make and I would recommend you use the pay as you go option Mailgun it's like it's some really inexpensive per block of a thousand emails that you pay per month that you use the cool thing though is they don't bill you until you send a thousand emails in one month so I've never been billed by Mailgun because I'm not doing really high volume stuff we use quite a bit of Mailgun stuff at Reclaim so we do pay them but I think given the amount of email we send out to you know invoices and all of that stuff you don't really pay that much as a company for the service it's really affordable unfortunately Mailgun only support sorry Ghost only supports Mailgun right now for newsletter so it is required but it's a great service and I would highly recommend it and I do expect in the future they'll support other email providers too alright so I've already logged in over here I just need to refresh my page I already have my Mailgun domain setup when you initially make a Mailgun account it'll walk you through how to do that I'm not quite sure why that's not working but what it does not that important to do is go to SMTP credentials and add a new user and hopefully this works I'm not really sure what's up with Mailgun right now so I'm going to give I'm going to call this ghost newsletter and then it's going to say how do you want to create a password automatic is fine oh my gosh I just realized I am getting weird I'm in the wrong domain here that's what's going on newsletter.jaden.me but for Mailgun okay that's much better I was accidentally looking at our reclaim stuff while signed into a different account so that's weird that Mailgun even had that bug but whatever ghost newsletter great so now I'll hit create and it said hey a new password has been created click copy I will do that I'm going to go back over to reclaim cloud and hit mail setup and I'm going to need to do paste the password in here it's a super long password the username is just this entire thing it actually gives you some of the details here so I'll paste that in I'll use the same from address that sounds good to me the host is smtp.mailgun.org so I'll paste that in and then it says alright what ports I guess I'll doesn't really matter I'll do 587 and then the service and transport this is a little bit weird but you do have to type this in smtp and smtp then I'm going to hit apply this is the part that is mail wizardry that I don't understand so it's now put that information into ghost for password resets and things like that the next thing I need to do is to also make an api key for mailgun and this lets the newsletter functionality actually work so I'm going to go back to mailgun here and it says sending api keys and I'm going to hit add sending key and this is all documented by the way on ghost actual documentation like from ghost.org because this is just the api key part is just every ghost setup would need something like this so I'll make this newsletter api key so I'm going to copy this I am of course going to delete these after we do this stream because these are all things you wouldn't want to share with folks so now I'm going to go over to my ghost site and oh I don't I'm not at the right domain name that's from before what was it oh I just have too many tabs open here my neat newsletter whoops sorry about that now I'm in the right tab if I log back into my ghost site and go into settings and then where is it I should remember this newsletter sending so it's got a bunch of newsletter related settings here and then under mailgun it says hey you need an api key so I'll hit edit and then I'm going to paste in that api key I got from mailgun I have to pick my region there's two regions of mailgun so I'm in the US region and then I have to give it the domain name that I'm using in mailgun which in my case is mg.jdn.me but this would be whatever your domain in mailgun is set to and so that's it the mailgun the mail configuration is done if you've never had to deal with mail like important mail you're probably like that was a couple steps just trust me this is a lot better than it often is mail is kind of hard email is kind of hard on the internet in terms of making sure things don't go to spam and stuff like that the cool thing about using mailgun is that kind of becomes mailgun's problem they make sure that emails are going to be configured correctly so that they don't go to spam of course unless you send spam email in which case they'll still go to spam but so our ghost site is configured we are now ready and we can use it and ghost itself is you make posts and the cool thing is I like that ghost is kind of all in the box I also like there's no plugins to get or configure or anything like that it's all just part of ghost that's also a downside in that ghost doesn't have some features that wordpress does that especially that wordpress can add with plugins but I think especially for something that's really focused on newsletters this is a really good balance of functionality and I will say from our perspective at Reclaim we're not finding ourselves missing stuff that we at least not regularly so it's a really nice tool yeah especially because this is basically the same thing that you've already said but because ghost is so focused on being a newsletter platform it's not really a site builder wordpress is a blogging platform you can do newsletters through it but it's also a site builder that people use just to make websites ghost is like if you're not blogging or sending a newsletter why are you here so one of the nice things about wordpress being open source means that there are plugins that can extend it in the ways that you might need to build your website in the way that you want but that's not as much of a question with ghost just noting in the discord chat there are templates so there are themes that you can use for ghost and they're a little bit different than wordpress themes though so like a wordpress theme is a lot of bearing on the functionality of the site whereas ghost themes are simply going to change the way the page looks they can do less but that also means from if you're learning ghost you're not going to get that shock to the system in wordpress where sometimes you pick a new theme and it's like oh this theme has all kinds of different configuration options and again I like that a lot of the time but on ghost all the themes kind of work the same if that makes sense so I can go in here and go to design and branding and then customize the other thing also about this is that I mean I haven't done it but it's been on my list for a long time is that ghost themes are more accessible I think than wordpress themes in terms of building your own yeah technically we're running on a roundup technically in like the strictest technical sense we're running a theme that I made but it but all it is is I took a ghost theme I copied the folder and changed like four lines of HTML in it but that's kind of the beautiful thing is because ghost themes are just they're technically called it's a templating language I think called handlebars but it's really just HTML and CSS like there's no like oh my theme doesn't support this version of PHP or in ghost case it all runs on node that's not really a thing with ghost so you can more confidently make kind of manual changes if you're comfortable with HTML in ghost and it's super nice we're not going to log into I don't want to log into our roundup site because there's people's emails there and I did not take the proper precautions to make sure we don't dox people basically but but basically you can actually you know what I could even demo it if we have time but when you're changing a theme so if I go right now I'm just looking at the basic theme you know color but I go down here to change theme there's a bunch of themes right in here you can also upload a theme into this interface so like I literally went into ghost and zipped up the theme you can probably also get these from like github or something they're all these are all open themes and I just made the changes and uploaded the zip file to ghost just like actually a very similar to wordpress in that way so and in our case I we just had some very small things we wanted to change but you can do a lot with it I used to run my main blog on ghost and I did spend some time customizing my theme and it was pretty simple I it was in interesting between something interesting between wordpress and like a static site generator in terms of how easy it was to kind of hack on as someone who like isn't afraid of changing HTML but isn't really a developer either so yeah that was really cool and there are other themes in here you also can from the settings of ghost do tons of stuff related to like customizing your like sign up flow and what that looks like and how that works which is I think really kind of nice again they keep it relatively simple but I even like that they have nice handy links like direct links to sign up and like if you have tiers like if you have you know pricing tiers for your site you can set those up and get links to them directly it's a really interesting balance of like focused but also giving you some good options yeah so one thing I wanted to mention here I'm gonna put in just a couple members so you can export and import users from CSV say they're members like for who would receive your newsletter their importer is weirdly good like you can kind of give it just like any CSV file and it will say cool how do you want to map this to like the things we need which is I didn't expect that that's really awesome it's nice it's also there's two things that I've experienced with their importer which is one it does pull in everybody well obviously pulls in everybody pulls them all in as members but if you one if the person's already in if the email is already in there but you say like oh my name my email is email at newsletter dot jayden dot m e or something but my name has changed and the CSV has a different name associated with that it'll just go oh I know that email I'll just change the name I'll just fix that and the other thing is ghost has two ways of its members can receive your emails or its members can be members of the site who've opted out of receiving emails nonetheless and if someone is in that CSV if email dot newsletter dot j dot m e if that email is already in there and that person has said listen I want to be a member but I don't want to get the email updates re-importing them is not going to change that setting yes yeah it's going to respect their unsubscription which is crucial you need to do that and it kind of it's kind of one of those things ghost does this quite often where it like you you think of like I tailor I'm like but actually even this specific thing happened when we first started using the roundup we would import like you know lists of people who we know are like administrators of domain and zone stuff like that and pilot was like oh I'm going to re-import that list and I was like pilot don't do that you're going to re-sign up everyone if they signed out and you were like no it just handles that and I was like what no way so it has tons of little details like that that really make it easy to manage I think yeah for context it's our admin newsletter so what we do is once a month we take an export of all of the people who are in our admin database and there's some churn there we get new people we get people taken off but if someone is on the list and has previously been on the list but opted out you know they're going to be in the CSV but it doesn't matter ghost is going to as you said respect that choice yeah so a couple of weird things about ghost I will mention is um especially if you're coming from other CMS like WordPress there is like there is like a specific about page and you can change this but this is like its own weird custom thing but every other page in ghost is just a post that you mark as a page basically a ghost has a little checkbox when you're making a post where you're like nah this post is a page which it's not that big of a deal but like I just again coming from WordPress it just kind of breaks my brain a little bit so I'm just we're not going to do much in here but let's first newsletter email well I don't know first email and ghost editor is I love it actually it's again somewhat simple but it's pretty easy to use and it doesn't it has most of the functions I like I really specifically like that ghost has mark down blocks built in that are really good so and by that I mean if you are mark down connoisseur as many of us are it supports pretty much all of the mark down stuff and it also is really hard for the the reader yeah sometimes I've seen systems that let you do this kind of thing where you can have non markdown and markdown and the markdown stuff will look different like it looks it doesn't get the same style apply to it and stuff like that this you can switch back and forth seamlessly it's really easy so that's cool I really like their image tool because it has a really simple way when you upload an image to do both caption and alt text it's huge yeah so easy and it's right there like it's right in the editor I really like that that wasn't always the case by the way when I used to use ghost I had my own like HTML snippet I'd use for images because I frequently want to caption an image with different text than my alt text and it didn't allow that that's something they added so super cool but I'll just for now I'll just kind of put some basic yeah whoops garbage text in autofills that's a tool I use a okay a text I don't have an image tool on my Mac to do that okay that's not a I was like wow ghost really does have everything yeah this is this is also we recently updated the version of ghost that we were using so this is new ish to me in terms of like email call to action I don't think they had that before they've added some new blocks yeah it looks like they have even like a specific like this is really cool too they have a specific mail merge type stuff a built in and then it says this is only visible when delivered via email which is that's cool feature so I don't know that we're using that that's gonna be really useful for everyone who is leaving sub stack exactly yeah so we'll just post this for now but the cool thing is when you can click the sidebar you can you know change a URL you can change like the date and things like that you can have post access be members only paid members only so members just anyone who is in your member list that we were just looking at before and by default you can disable this but by default anyone can sign up to be a free member but if you had paid memberships you could limit to that or you can get granular and say there's specific tiers we're just gonna make ours public but you know that's the thing you can do this is also the that ghost differentiates between member and member with subscription going back to that thing especially because members in ghost they're more like users with the subscriber role in wordpress in that you also like being a member doesn't get you access to the admin interface necessarily like that's a ghost has a separate thing those are called users in ghost whereas in wordpress it kind of mixes them together a little bit so that is one difference ghost also for commenting you do need to make an account on the ghost site that's one thing that is both a blessing and a curse on wordpress you can allow comments from just anybody and you can use like a kismet to manage blogs spam and stuff ghost you have to like specifically sign in to make an account to comment on the site which is I have mixed feelings about I think I can see why they do it that way but there are also other commenting systems that sometimes people use with ghosts that are a little bit more open anyway you can also go through here and like edit the metadata and how it will look on search engines and on I refuse to call X on Twitter and Facebook and and then I like that that's all kind of visible right here I love that they have like a little keyboard shortcut thing as a keyboard shortcut fan I love when people place this in an easy to find spot but I think we're ready to publish this beautiful beautiful blog post and I'm gonna hit publish and this is another thing I really like so it says cool are you here's what we're gonna do you can publish and email it you can only publish it or you can send it as just an email they won't show up as a blog post on your site this is I like how simple that is to do there's also sorry you continue maybe you're gonna say this already but you can also choose who it goes to right so you can have different subscriber tiers you can also have labels in ghost so separate from tiers you can like tag people and for our go setup I have a tag that's just called test and it's a way for me to just send a test email to like me and actually I think I'm the only one on there right now but but you know any number of us that reclaim could add ourselves to that test label and that's really handy to just get a test email basically and then you can also schedule it to go now or do it later this I will say is becomes counterintuitive I think we've run into this pretty recently with the new log we've run I want this to be published at a certain time like next week 9 a.m. on Tuesday I want this to come out for one reason or another but I think it is a little bit scary to go hit that publish button without knowing that there's going to be a last checks section so this is good to know if you are new to ghost there's going to be a last check section and that's the section where you say when you want it to come out because otherwise we've yeah so I'll hit publish and hit send and it says cool you're done it's being sent I'm going to check my email and yep let me sorry I don't want to you don't all get to see my email so I'm going to pull that up really quick and bring it into the stream but I have to do that specifically but here we go and this is what it looks like by default so you can actually modify this email template too but it is just a really nice simple template by default and you know got your unsubscribe link in here and all that kind of stuff so this is another template I like how simple for a self-hosted tool they make it really fast to go from I have nothing to I have a newsletter that works this is also in terms of when you're writing things up I'm thinking about the full post or the full site editor or something not that they've got that in WordPress when you're writing your blog post it looks almost exactly like it's going to publish it it's got all the formatting in place the ghost editor doesn't do that so if there have been times when I've been writing and I've been going like is this going to look how I want it to look it is going to look how you want it to look on the site and I think that the email might change some stuff but stylistically at least for what we use it's going to come out looking pretty similar to the styling of your actual site there has been many a reclaimed community chat talking about full site the site editor and full site editing on WordPress that ghost doesn't do as good of a job in terms of the editor looking exactly like your page is going to look you should preview especially if you're doing something kind of complicated that being said I think ghost does do a really good job of your post is going to look I have not yet seen a post that looks meaningfully different from the email content which is honestly significant because it's email formatting and stuff is kind of weird it is all technically still HTML but the way you do that in email is so different that it's not a given that this stuff just works out of the box but in our experience for ghost anyway it really does work pretty seamlessly including like gifs and stuff like that yeah so that's it we did it we had a whole talk about self hostable tools and open tools and we published a nonsense first issue of my neat newsletter so yeah I'm going to call it a good win do you all have anything before we kind of sign off we are a couple minutes over time but no I got a head out so this was a great stream though and I appreciate the chat that we've all had in discord I loved to start the day off with some open source tea so thanks Taylor for sure see you all see you