 Hey there everybody welcome to session two of running a newsletter with ghost We're gonna I'm here with pilot and If you don't know pilot pilot want you introduce yourself a little bit. Yeah, sure so I'm pilot I am the Hosting account manager at reclaim which means I do a lot of different things. I send a lot of emails I talk to a lot of people I Work with both the sales and the ed tech teams and one of the things that I'm responsible for is compiling our monthly newsletter Which is the reclaim ground up we run it in ghost so I am in charge of collecting all of the items that we want to put there and Putting them in order organizing them and writing them up giving that sort of cohesive tone and just Generally making it something that we can send out into the world on the end of the month I guess I'm gonna date this video. We are recording right at the tail end of October So we are in the process of compiling at the October roundup, which will go out on Monday the 31st and So we're probably gonna be I mean I've been thinking a lot about the process for how we put this together both for this Workshop and for this flex course and for I've been trying to write some internal documentation So it doesn't all live in my head. And so this has just been a really good Opportunity for me to examine what this actually means. What putting this together does Yeah, I'm excited the I'm I'm betting this will be our spookiest roundup yet And it'll be great and it comes out on the official first day of this workshop The So, yeah, we're gonna dig into during this session All of We're gonna dig into the ghost interface. We're gonna be doing stuff and ghosts in the dashboard We've already set up our ghost install last week So I last time demoed that so we'll kind of leave pick up where we left off where if you've been following along You should have a ghost site if you want to follow along for this session You don't have to have anything in the ghost site other than you should be able to log in The I made a new one actually for this week because I showed my database credentials last time so And I don't not great thing to put on a public video But yeah, so we're gonna be working with my little dummy site newsletter dot Jaden dot me And we'll also show Some stuff in the roundup roundup, but where do you want to start? Yeah? I mean, so there's a bunch of different places that we can start I would say that I have things sort of outlined by The beats that I want to hit So I think maybe the first place to look at would just be the front page of the roundup if you have that open And we can take a look at that Because that just seems like a good place to start which is thinking about What you want to be doing? with your newsletter so Just thinking through what we wanted to accomplish with the roundup this actually got started as an idea at our 2021 team retreat where we were thinking hey There's a lot of stuff that we do behind the scenes that we want to make more known to To our customers the schools that we work with we want to make sure that people are able to See what resources are available to them what research we're doing the Blogging the projects things that are happening behind the scenes that they're maybe not aware of It's also a really good way to get announcements out because You want to have a way for people to know what's happening. That's kind of important So that was what we were thinking about for the roundup that was Defining what our objectives were and Defining our topic so the topic is reclaim. What's the work that we're doing and the objective is Getting the word out basically letting people know You can do So I would say that that's probably the first and most important thing that you want to be doing when you are making your newsletter is knowing what you're going for and All of my examples today are going to be grounded in the roundup because that's The newsletter that I make that's what we do here But there are going to be some resources for this week that talk about Different modes will get into Modes and what you might want to be talking about This is just sort of the starting place for a topic. What do you want to talk about? How do you want to talk about it? What's your focus? um So Then we're just working through it Planning it's this is again the part of this is a really Personal choice and that makes it sound super difficult and oh gosh This is so personal, but the main thing is that you want to be running something that you enjoy Making if you are making something that you hate making you will stop making it or you will be miserable and then Yeah, you know, you'll stop I imagine that that has a lot to do with sort of topic selection what you're gonna write about but also Pace yeah, when are you writing? How often does it come out things like that? Yeah for sure So That's actually a really good Dovetail into one of the things that I want to talk about which is we put out the roundup monthly. There are some Newsletters that go out weekly daily daily. Oh my god by weekly There are other forms of sort of serialized like podcasts come out on various schedules and The important thing there is to pick a schedule that you can manage So the roundup works for us it comes out once a month Which that's a great period of time for us to collect work If we put out all the work that we do over the course of a week It's gonna be kind of flimsy and you're gonna be getting a lot of emails from us as opposed to one nice solid email per month This is also important because we can't build up a backlog There are if you are doing I'm publishing this Every week every two weeks you may want to build up a backlog of things so that you I don't know if you hit Gosh, what's coming up that might impact your schedule of a holiday season? What maybe you have to travel? That way that if something happens you end up with a backlog you can continue to put things out pretty regularly Regular I feel so strange things because Part of my philosophy is like, you know, this can be for fun. You can be doing it for you Also the things that I know about marketing and communications are if you put things out regularly, that's how you Sustain an audience because they know what to expect and when to expect it. So That's maybe also one of the things that separates a newsletter from a blog is putting it out really consistently sure So Do you have a question? Not really. I mean, I think one of the things that is interesting to me and it's it's it's maybe tangential but like the the consistent schedule too, I think you hear people talk about that a lot in Reference as well too like I think that's generally good advice, right, but You also hear let a lot in reference to like L algorithmic content, which of course this isn't right So yeah, people are subscribing and it gets emailed to them or maybe they're subscribed in an RSS feed Or something like that Whereas a lot of times you hear like YouTube content creators talk a lot about that because it'll be like, ah, yes The algorithm wants me to post at least once or twice a week or whatever and so it is kind of To me one of the refreshing things about blogging or newsletter creation at all is a I mean, you know Depending on what you're doing. You may not care if there's not like I blog For me, right? Yeah, you know, but newsletters typically you have an audience in mind and I think Consistency is really kind of it the consistency and making it manageable is really the main thing that Matters right like you you don't have to worry about like if we do it, you know We do it once a month the email algorithm isn't gonna like it. No not really a worry I mean, you probably don't want to do it too often and to make it you burn out on writing it and Maybe you don't want email inbox fatigue for the people subscribed if you're doing it super often But it's kind of refreshing, right? It is really more about how you are interacting with it than anything else Yeah, and that's also Thinking about sort of the length of what you want to be putting out And the amount of work that you want to you want to be doing for each Installation addition whatever you want to call it. So the roundup anecdotally Also, this number has changed because we keep adding sections because we keep finding out that we have more to say But the roundup generally clocks in at between like 1700 22,000 22,000 2200 words Which is Not that short And that's partially just because I I like to go on and on and on and because we keep adding stuff But also it's monthly. So it's a collection of a sizable amount of stuff That's happened over the past month Whereas if I was putting 1700 words into your inbox every week or twice a week I think that people would become a lot less likely to read those emails And also it would be hell. I would hate writing that so often I would have to I Generally devote the last four to five days of the month to Putting the round up together And this works because I can say alright that last week that last four to five days I know that I'm going to need to put aside a good chunk of my time So I can do a bunch of stuff earlier. I can postpone stuff if it has to happen, but not for a little while If I had to do that every single week That would be unsustainable for me given everything else that I need to do well and and in generally I mean as well it helps that the way our team works here We kind of all know well pilots in roundup mode right now, you know Not that I don't ever ask you questions or anything like that, of course, but it happens, but but I think When you say dedicate the time that that is what it looks like from me from an outside perspective, it's like yeah, no like We're gonna try to avoid having too many too many things stack up at that point otherwise the roundup is not to be manageable and just Keeping in mind that writing is long At least for for me and I think most people it takes a long time. You need you need to dedicate that time Yeah, it's not just gonna happen Yeah, and one of the other things about that is also workload So I'm responsible for the roundup at the end of the month But we also have a mid-month email that's I think mostly just announcements and Amanda handles that and she does a great job But that also takes a lot of the pressure off of me because if you're putting out the announcements once a month Then you better hope to God people read those but if you're putting them out twice a month People are much more likely to just see that it's not as Big of a deal so Amanda's doing a really great job with the mid-month email and Splitting those responsibilities means less strain on both of us because we don't have to handle all of the burden of email communications that we put out every month I Want to very quickly touch on mode Which is a Thing that I started thinking about as a result of an article that I actually read published by ghost Which is six types of newsletters you can start today That'll be in our weekly resources It's it basically covers Really quickly six types of newsletters that you might want to do and the idea is the topic that you pick Thanks for pulling that up Taylor You can pick a topic and a mode and so they are not the same thing so the six types really quickly that they go through are reporting so general Journalistic reporting analysis, which is generally like reporting, but it's more tech technical academic research oriented curation That's probably closest to what the roundup is the roundup is a collection of things You just collect things and you put them all together and they talk about taste makers and influencers who make sure that they're picking up the best stuff The roundup is a curation email You don't have to be an influencer to make a curation email or a newsletter Artistic, which is probably the closest to a personal blog That's your own reflections creative works your personal takes and practical tutorials how-to's Recipe blogs would fit into that category and then a hybrid which is a Cop out because that's just a mix of any of the previous five But then they give the example of you could do a If your topic is baking your mode could be any of these you could report on Major baking news that exists you could do Chemical reason I they have a list that I don't it's boring for me to just read the list And I don't have it memorized But the point is that you can write poems about bread you can give your recipe blog tutorials You can curate recipes that other people have put out and that The mode that you pick and the topic that you choose are not the same thing So for us our topic is the work that we do at reclaim and our mode is curation because those fit together really well for what we wanted to do which was Make sure everybody knows about all of the things that we do Well, and it affects greatly a lot of things right if it affects not only How you Put together the newsletter like what you're doing to curate Obviously like if it's not a curation, you're maybe sitting down and being like I'm gonna write my one piece For the artistic, you know because I'm doing an artistic one, but you're curating so it's it's pulling in things and then writing about them But also I think it also probably affects the tone in what you write too Intent it seems like the roundup Like we know that you write it, but it doesn't really come off as like first-person Pilot talking through an email, right? It comes off as reclaim hosting with some personality Yeah, but not necessarily an individual personality Yeah, and I mean that tone you're absolutely right that tone sort of comes out of the mode that you pick and what you want to accomplish so a Analysis newsletter is probably going to be very really quite formal considering that it's Dedicated to that sort of technical academic language a Journalistic reporting newsletter is maybe gonna sort of straddle that line of like this is professional, but this is not Maybe inaccessible We want to make sure that it's easy for people to get into The roundup we try and keep Yeah, pretty casual pretty informal pretty friendly because We want this to be a peek behind the curtain is basically the concept to see What it is that we do behind the scenes and Behind the scenes and here's an extremely formal Dressed up version of all the things that we're doing are kind of not they don't match. It's not a great mix So instead we go for that as you were saying Reclaim hosting with a bit of personality informal. We put in these fun gifts. We have little captions It's not strictly first-person, but I don't usually try and stick to very solid third person I use a lot of the royal we if you go through it. Sure So it's reclaim hostings first-person basically and thinking about that tone will also inform a lot of the Knowing what tone you want to go for is also going to make your writing easier And it's going to make your revising a lot easier because if you know what you're going for the first time around then when you go through you Will have fewer problems with tone inconsistency where you say oh, this was actually not what I'm going for I have to go back and change this whole thing Yeah, um We want to make sure we're getting through everything But those are sort of the first couple of things that I would think about before starting to get into the more technical aspects of Putting together the newsletter, which is I think Taylor we were gonna go behind the scenes and sort of Get into the ghost interface a little bit more But having put that thought into what you want to be writing and how you want to be writing it and all of that then you can start to look at Ghost as a tool and what you're doing there So I actually want to talk about design first because a lot of the rest of the stuff will sort of Roll together And I'm picturing like Indiana Jones Rolling Boulder kind of rolling together So talking about design first will mostly mean thinking about themes So ghost actually this is the ghost dashboard It's pretty Clear easy to navigate Jim calls it. I think elegant. Is it word for it? I do want to remind people too that if you haven't logged in since last week newsletter Whatever your ghost domain name that you've mapped We slash ghost at the end unlike wordpress word slash admin. This is slash ghost. Yeah Yeah And so this takes you to your dashboard It is that sort of more streamlined than wordpress But you still have that left-hand menu. You have the dashboard. You have your posts area. You have your pages area Taylor has recently informed me that that's new. That's not something that ghost used to have ghost supports pages now Yeah, I mean it did for a long time, but for a long time when you wanted to make a page you would go make a post Manually set the URL and then there was a checkbox that says this is a page And that just excluded it from the RSS feed and stuff like that, but yeah They now broken it out into its own pages to have okay yeah so if we can just hop into the Themes checker which is yeah in that gear menu takes you to customization and then up to design So you customize your site and you manage themes and this just shows what it would look like up front This is the default ghost theme. I think it might just be called ghost But if we it's called Casper, right? Okay. Yes, so I I get the joke ghost Yeah, um and so ghost has its own theme a Browser basically, which is what we're looking at now. They also have options for you to upload your own customized themes and The themes are also sort of tagged I guess with what they are oriented towards so magazine podcast blog newsletter. I believe the theme that we use is called digest There's oh photography documentation. So if you wanted to run your docs through here Um Yeah, so that's digest right in the middle. Yes, that's that's what we use It is my dream to customize our theme more than we already have Taylor I know you've done some customization just to strip out elements of Ghost presupposes a lot of stuff about your goals and then builds in little features and widgets to help you achieve those and We didn't want a lot of that stuff on our particular newsletter But yeah, it is interesting because and I I mentioned this in session one But didn't really show it and it's frankly a little out of scope of what I think we want to tackle in this workshop, but like you don't have to be Like you really only have to be comfortable with html and css to mess around with ghost themes and you need some time In that time, I mean you got to be willing to like dig through a bunch of files The the the cool thing about ghost themes is they are written in in this format called handlebars Which I think they invented but it's just html with a different file extension Um, and then inside of it will be little tags that are kind of like mail merge like where it will merge in other files or your post content um, but what that means is like if you are Um, comfortable with html and comfortable with maybe like the browser inspector You can go find on your actual website like oh, I want to change this part and just do a control f Through your theme and find it and be like yes change it um Basically, so um, it's it's kind of cool. Um, and I guess if there's interest in that I could demo that at some point But um, I don't think many people are going to need that frankly. Um in most cases because you can do a lot That ghost is really set up to be kind of Simple to start with you know And then a lot of things you can do by just simply hiding In css just like you could do in wordpress too. Like there is a way to do custom css in the dashboard without modifying your theme Um, but yeah, it's it's pretty simple and then what's nice is you can literally just Um, so like when I modify the theme I I literally just uploaded it as its own theme. Um that I Zipped up right so for me to Continue messing with it was pretty simple or you could use like ftp. So Um, but yeah, they're they're quite simple You do not have to be say like a node j s developer or a php developer in like the wordpress case To do it. It's you just have to be comfortable with html Awesome That has made me feel a lot better about my goal of figuring out how to design a ghost theme We can definitely do that and I would say maybe that would be a cool stream where I can kind of walk you through that Again, probably not in this course. I think it's out of the scope of that But I think maybe folks would be interested in it. We could do that at some point 100% Yeah That would be awesome. Actually Um Do you have something you want to hit next? No, I'll keep going. All right. Um Cool, do you want to change the theme here? Just sure. Why not? Uh, let's uh, what do you think looks cool? Do you want to do bulletin? Do you want to do? Let's do bulletin. All right. Let's go bulletin. So I mean you click on it you hit use and it's going to It's going to install thing. Ooh validation field is required. That's weird. All right. Let's pick a different one Hold on. I'm going to refresh my page too. Okay. Maybe there's something wrong with my That's no good. I'm gonna have to look at that and um What's going on with the themes and um, I'll put in discord What's going on there? It's very possible that I've messed something up with my own install here, so But uh Yeah, for some reason changing things isn't working, but it's it's pretty straightforward You should just be able to click use and then install and it will switch it over. So yeah Designed to be very intuitive. Yes. Yeah Um Well now that we are in ghost, I'm maybe going to talk through sort of what my compilation Collation curation processes Uh, keep switching different terms Uh But generally the way that it works is again again, this is for us as a curation style newsletter, um What we do is throughout the month People are putting different examples of their work into the Into our slack channel And so we have rss feeds for everybody's blogs that feed into the blogs channel. We have uh Support documentation that our support team is putting together every month. Um We have people just come in and say hey, I found out about this cool thing. Have you heard about it? um, and for all of that we I put together a Custom emoji. It's the paper airplane emoji and I can Maybe post a picture of it in discord. Maybe we can add it to discord. I don't know Uh But there's a custom paper airplane emoji and it turns out that in slack you can search for messages that have been reacted to Did my blog I did blog this Because you told me about it and I went cool. I'm gonna forget that exists. Um And so I actually I yeah, I have that blog post somewhere um but So we can hit it with that paper airplane and then throughout the month periodically I can come back and search. Hey, what's had that paper airplane applied to it? And then I can just grab the links to whatever's in there. Um This is really great because it means that I don't yep. There's my blog post uh I don't have to Be on alert all the time making sure that every single time I see a link I copy paste it and I put it somewhere people don't have to Uh Man you they don't have to add to me every time they see something they can just put the paper airplane emoji on there um And it also saves me a ton of work in that I can do this sort of periodically I can say all right Well, uh, it's friday. I'm gonna go back through the past week and see what new things have been Hit with that paper airplane As the impact is so low too, right? Yeah, it's not like you're pulling up A separate document not that that would be the end of the world or anything but To do it right in the place where for us all our work is Happening really or at least visible Um, it's pretty cool. Yeah Yeah, and it makes it really smooth for What I try and do just periodically throughout the month is we actually have an asana project, um for the roundup where each month is its own section and each Section of the newsletter is its own task And taylor if you can pull up. Yeah, so that's the uh task for our blog posts. It's not assigned to anybody because We are all writing blog posts together basically, but this is a collection of the blog posts that have been published so far in the month of october Uh, the person who wrote it the title a link a brief description because Having notes for myself helps later. You will note that I haven't finished that for everybody I'm I'm going to do that because it's the end of the month. I have to do that Uh, I cannot emphasize enough. Don't make yourself do all of this at the end of the month Don't do it go back periodically and just do it Do it do it a little bit at a time throughout the month. Don't do it all at once. It's not good. Don't do that um I have that bolded and in all caps in my notes Don't make yourself do all of this at the end of the month. It's not good Uh, this is also going back to that thing of Making sure that you're picking a manageable amount of time and a manageable amount of stuff that you want to be putting out Because if you want to be doing a lot very frequently, that's going to be really rough Um But yeah, so I Generally go through I collect all of these things. This is the blog posts one. We also have one for staff picks We also have one for our support documentation We have one for announcements, which doesn't actually have these links It has just bullet points as I hear about things. I say, oh, yeah, we probably need to tell people about that um So announcements will have uh new hires or we're hiring uh Events that we're planning. Um, I try and feature events up to three months in the future So for the october roundup that's coming out on the 31st It'll feature november events december events and january events. Um And I find that that's usually a pretty good lead time because if there's a november event and nobody hears about it until October 31st People are a lot less likely to come to that than if they can plan on it like three months in advance Uh, I do this this is more for our flex courses in our workshops for community chats Those have a consistent place those have a consistent sort of concept to them. So I don't Block those out quite as far in advance, especially because we plan the community chats Less far in advance than we do the flex courses in the workshops Um, but so we have sections for all of those different things. Uh, and then once I have those, uh, I would just take All of that text and then I would copy paste it into a post on ghost um So if you can hop in I think I have the draft of the halloween Uh roundup already open So yeah, uh, it looks pretty bare bones right now. I always add the images last And it taylor if you scroll through the top looks very clean and nice because that's the part that I've Written and then you can already start seeing there's parts where I just have big notes to myself But just say finish It's not done here yet Collections of links. Uh, this section is totally done because we only had one item to go into what's happening in discord If you scroll down a little bit further, I think I dropped That's the staff picks section not the blog posts, but it'll look pretty similar to Uh, what you saw in asana. This is the same thing but from a different Uh section um author what it is Short description or where I can find more information um This and I wanted to kind of mention to um that uh, just because this will be some folks first time getting into the post section Yes, um, so of course Back again on the dashboard. You can go to posts You can click the little plus button to make a new post, but um, you will see here Which is kind of cool. Um, and you won't see this just yet because We haven't done mail setup. That's going to be next week and um, we Presumably have no one subscribe to your newsletter Um, so you will see that there's a sends column so you can see how many people were sent that particular thing And opens is something that we are still kind of messing around with there's theoretically ways where you can pull in like, uh How many recipient information? Yeah That will show you how you can do that mail gun and there's theoretically ways to get that into ghost too But um, we're not going to get there at the at the moment But when you do make a new post, um the post editor is Pretty clean and simple in ghost. Um, there's a little sidebar over here You can do things like set your url. You can schedule a post to go out if you want to Um, or set the the publish date. I should say, um When you do tags at the privacy settings for it, you can manually do an excerpt, which is um, that will pull in Uh in like google search results, it'll be what they show if you don't put one here It's going to just use the first sentence or two, which is most of the time what you want um And there's other things. Um ghost has kind of like very built-in Uh tools to look at like what does the I kind of like this, but I've never really needed it. You could have it set like what is If you share this facebook and bad gonna look like yeah, yeah Um, so wordpress does this but it's harder to edit it if you want to change it Um, whereas ghost has this built in and there's just like a little thing right there to change it Which is kind of neat. Um And then certain themes have the ability to like feature a post at the top like pin it basically So that's that's a that's going to be there regardless of if your theme supports it or not by the way, so Um, but yeah, that's that's it like there's that that's all the settings for a post and Then you can preview things and you can obviously edit Your post and then there's um some things to know about editing the post. I would say Yeah, there's a couple of things. I want to hit which are if you start A new paragraph you actually maybe want to do it a little further up because otherwise it'll be behind our heads uh So yeah Um, you can hit that plus button. Okay, that's better right You can hit that plus button and that'll let you pick from a couple of different types of thing Uh, so image markdown html Uh image galleries dividers and stuff like that um I use this most often when Uh embedding gifts, uh, but you can do a lot of different formatting things Video audio and if you go far enough down there are embeds for youtube uh twitter code pen Uh nfts if you want to embed your nft into a newsletter Uh, you can do that. I feel like that goes against the philosophy of nfts, but that's fine I don't really know how that works. Uh, we don't use that very much. I'm gonna give a hot take. Um, and that's uh The nfts only philosophy is selling them. So that's true Yeah, that's fair, uh But yeah, so that would be how you'd get um In the same way that word plus wordpress now has the block editor that can do a bunch of fancy different functions This is pretty similar. Yeah, it's definitely stripped down like it doesn't have as many and as we mentioned last time There's no plugins for ghost. Um, so you can't add to this Um, I mean you could there are integrations that you can do with ghosts, but we haven't tried any of them Yeah, well the integrations are Interesting that they call them integrations, but they're mostly from the other side. So it's typically like Hey, you can use this api There's some exceptions mailgun is one. Uh mailgun is an exception There's just like built in support, but it's not something you like enable or disable or anything like that It's just their integrations pages. Just say hey, here are other tools and products that work with ghost. Okay. Um, so Yeah, it's it's kind of interesting. It's really just like a home page for them to say these are the things you can do and and things we know about but like the the um, the post Editor it is what it is. You you don't really change it unless you go unless you're an open source developer and you want to fork it This is what you get. Um, I will say I really do like the post editor in ghost. It kind of is Extremely focused on making the editing Happen and there's no like really extraneous features. I don't I don't typically find it frustrating to use So I find it pleasant to write in ghost. I have run into things where it doesn't do one thing I want to do like I wanted to do like an image That had an alt tag, of course But also a caption and I wanted the caption to be different And at least at one point in ghost I had to do that manually in html So that's the downside. Yeah, and that I was gonna say I'm pretty sure they've revised that that was years ago But it is kind of what the flip side is It is simple, but sometimes if you want to do something really fancy you may have to just do it in html Which is a little annoying, but I would say at this point There's probably very few things particularly for a newsletter that you will ever need to do that way And that is the one thing I can also mention too is in the context of a newsletter This simplicity benefits you because there's only certain things you can even do in an email inbox, right? And it is really cool to see how ghost is a really good job of taking what you write on this page And translating it to the web page, right? I very rarely are we surprised by the way something looks on the web page Yeah And and even more rarely are we ever surprised by the way something comes through in an email and that is no small feat If you've ever had to do anything with like html based emails, it's not always very straightforward Yeah, uh, there is one thing that about the Editor that I Once you know about it, it's like fine. It adds an extra step. Uh, if you don't know about it, it Uh causes you lots of stress and it's bad Which is um, if you open that menu with the metadata again You can see that at the top the post url is set to a special spooky roundup Um, which is you know, that's the title because this is the halloween roundup. That's when it's going out Uh, taylor if you hop back out to posts Uh, you will see the demo title here. There's no content in that. There's just the title If you open that up and go to the metadata tab You will see that the default post url is always this the title It is always the first title that you give a document. It doesn't change when you change the title Uh, yeah, so even if it's not published yet, right even if it's not published yet. So I have written Figure out the title later Or something to that effect And we had to go back in change the url and then I had taylor coded a redirect to make sure that people who went to the old url went to the right place Uh, so that's Yeah, and the reader It's kind of the flip side of wordpress, right wordpress assigns a url if you haven't picked one It assigns one when you publish a post. Yeah ghost assigns one when you create a post or a draft a post. Yeah So that that is I've definitely done that before too. Luckily redirects aren't too bad There is a it's a little bit weird, but basically there's a and I think we can show this There's a place in ghost in settings Um, I don't have to remember off the top of my head here actually I think it's labs and then yeah, and then redirects. So this is it's very different than wordpress super weird But it's at least not impossible to figure out. Basically redirects are a file That you download and edit So you will hit download and then open it up and open it in like a text editor And it will have a little thing like this and you basically just do here's where it was and here's where I wanted to go You can see both of my my titles for The ground up that I forgot to change Yeah, no no worries So yeah, it's it's a little weird and then what you do is you go back So you save, you know, you make your changes and you save it and you go back here and hit upload And you'll upload your file. Mine's in my downloads folder, right? So anyway, that's how you do it very different Uh than wordpress obviously in fact, I'm not I think I always use a plugin for wordpress called redirection um to do this kind of thing in wordpress um, but uh Maybe there's a native way to do it in wordpress. I'm not aware of but I don't know about that I don't think there is of course you can you can in keeping in mind the reason we wanted to do this is The email already went out, right? So we wanted to make sure that people would Like who are clicking on a link would end up in the new place Just simply changing a url is very easy to do all you have to do is change it from that field as we show Yeah, um It's just in this particular case. We had maybe sent it to someone already or maybe the email was already out or something like that so yeah Just so you know, that's hand that's pretty easy to do But you do kind of need nowhere to look because I will say the first time I need to do this and go I was like, oh man like what do I do? Everything's terrible. There are also the other hackier way to do it But that totally works if you want to is you could just make a new post Give it the url you want to redirect from put nothing in the post and then use like a little html meta refresh tag That's what I used to do when I ran ghost on my blog because I didn't know about the redirects functions So works just fine You might have to do a stream on how to make that work Yeah, it's it's not too bad By meta refresh. I mean like if you you uh, wow html meta refresh It's this thing, right? It's just like the html tag that says hey refresh and go here So that was that my post only had that in it. That was all the content of the post um, that totally works and honestly is a pretty good solution. So I you can do that too, but the redirects file thing is a little strange But I like it because it is kind of cool to have like one place to look at like all of your redirects. So Yeah, certainly nice Yeah um As far as the editor goes that covers a lot of what I wanted to talk about there. Um I wanted to quickly touch on Just while we're talking about compiling stuff Talking about writing is a little bit weird because again that that's based on the tone That's based on what you want to accomplish that is also going to be based on just Your voice as a writer. So I can't I don't know how to teach people to write Except maybe I could make a style guide to writing the roundup, but that's not really what this workshop is about I need you to write a brand playbook for the roundup Yeah, I have documentation going. I can add another section um but uh in terms of Putting it together You saw the asana you saw the big old list of Stuff that I just copy pasted in And then within a section You think about the sections that you want. So for us that was announcements that was We added in case you missed it or what's happening in discord Which is just hey sometimes we have impromptu events in discord taylor will host streams And those aren't really announced beforehand, but if you want to maybe hear about them join our discord And if you want to watch what happened, there's a recording. It was a stream um There's the blog post section of course support documentation And then staff picks are our main sections Uh, and those are sort of organized in order of we need people to look at the announcements What you missed in discord is usually pretty short and it's event related And we want people to come to the events. Um, I'm fine with admitting that it's nice when people Show up to stuff. Um Blog posts and support documentation We're trying to highlight our work and then staff picks are fun, but they are not stuff that we are as invested in Highlighting in showcasing so those go at the end within the sections I also ended up thinking about how to organize stuff for announcements, there's a really Pretty solid format, which is new hires hiring Anything where we need people to send us stuff that always goes at the top um because That's going to be the first thing that people see we need that to be the first thing that people see uh Then we go into announcements about events The flex courses and the workshops like I said, I try and do that For the next three months, um with the nearest to the furthest So for the one coming out on monday, that'll be Uh This and hacks for hybrid which are the november stuff. Um hacks for hybrid started first so it gets to go first um The december workshop which will be Uh, oh yeah, there we go the december flex course will be open media ecosystems And that'll also run into january and then in january we're talking about obs which will flow into that After those is the community chats because again, those are events. We want people to come to the events. We're highlighting the events I don't know what the november community chat is yet. So that's Just marked as something I need to finish. Uh The I do the upcoming community chat and then I do the most recent community chat and that's all And then we go into infrastructure updates. Um And that's a really solid Oh, and then community feature is something that we're experimenting with. We had uh lansing community colleges uh hiring Thing in our community feature last month. There's something that I'm supposed to put in there that I don't remember what it is right now but All of that stuff ends up going towards the end of announcements Uh What's happening in discord that doesn't need to be organized. There's usually one or two things there Uh The other sections are more sort of holistic. Um, I usually end up grouping those by topic because then you can do things like Uh, for example, I think it was in july. There was that ed tech angst conversation going around And so I could do one or two paragraphs that were like, uh, Jim and yeah, that would have been yeah, that would have been the july round up I think um So if you scroll down recent blog posts Uh That's some stuff from jim and then there's like two There's three different paragraphs on ed tech angst right there. Um agony uh And so I can I usually Cure I collect those things in the order that I find them So usually that's publication order, but then I'll go back and I'll say all right Well, these three are all in conversation with each other. So let's put them together These two are on the same topic. So let's put them together. Um And that also is sort of a little hack that means that I can condense things because I can Say rather than writing one three sentence paragraph about one post I can write one three sentence paragraph Where each two of the sentences are each about one post and so it makes things a little bit shorter and a little bit smoother um I have to finagle it a little bit to make sure that Everybody's getting their time in the sun. I really don't want it to be like. Yeah, uh, taylor and jim. I'll write about this That's fine. Let's keep moving. That's not fun. I want to give a little bit of A showcase of what each of you said what's going on But the ability to group things does mean that I don't have to block out A paragraph each for every individual post Which helps because our blogging section gets really long July was a really good example of that, which is why I did a lot of uh condensing in that one We had a lot of blog posts come out in July Support documentation that also gets grouped by topic. Um Support docs are not usually in conversation with each other in the same way But for example, we've been focusing on wordpress multi site documentation lately And so I can say Amanda and meredith and gordon have all been working on wordpress multi site documentation from amanda's There's this and it explains such such and such and then meredith wrote this Which is a great guide on how to do this and then this is what gordon wrote and that talks about this um And so that creates Little units Which means that for example, if someone is only here for the wordpress multi site documentation They go okay. Well, that's what I want. I'm going to ignore everything else But it's all in one place so they can find it easily uh Yeah, so for example, we had that is from our september one Uh wordpress multi site amanda and meredith put out a couple of new documentation and new guides. Um There's I don't know who that's supposed to be in the gif I got but So things are organized around that topic roughly. Um, so I generally treat reclaim cloud as a really big category that everything gets grouped together in uh unless There's something more granular that I can go with but Usually it'll be like this is all the wordpress multi site stuff. This is all the reclaim cloud stuff. This is We had actually a couple a month or two ago We had one that was like how to manage your files in the file manager and c-panel and in Uh reclaim clouds file manager setup And so those got grouped together even though they're across two systems because they're similar topics It I think this is the support documentation in particular is a really good example of Or maybe like a good time to kind of circle back that something will probably come up a few times Something that jim has blogged about a few times which is sort of like Why do we find this valuable at reclaim like the roundup at all and It's really multifaceted. I think right like it's it's a um Obviously we hope that some people find it valuable right that they subscribe and they're like cool That's new stuff coming out of reclaim. That's great. Obviously. That's like the first thing But I think there's kind of subtler advantages that are maybe Just as important in most ways I think for us anyway And that is it really is a great way for us to mark the work and look back at the roundups and say like This is what we did, you know And that's huge. I think support documentation is a really big part of that because we can look at like The pace of what are we updating and and adding to But then I think another one that's really important is obviously like for the support documentation case For linking to a specific thing Sometimes someone will get that email and go. Whoa, that is specifically something I was looking for and that's really cool But obviously that's going to be kind of niche, right? That's not going to happen all the time It's not like we're sending this newsletter out to 10,000 100,000 people, right? Yeah, I mean, I guess if that many people wanted to subscribe like cool We'd have to upgrade our mail and set it up again. Yeah. Well, um, I think it would be good actually I think I just uh, we would just be paying more but yeah, because um, but um At that point that that's a pretty large volume newsletter. And so um, right now we are Volume is small enough that it isn't really probably even register Um in our mail gun stuff, but we do use mail gun for a bunch of different things that reclaim. Anyway, um But uh But I think the other thing is just to show people who are reading this and go like Hey, there's a lot of stuff in the knowledge base. It's being added to constantly You should consider checking it out. Yeah, but like and that is something that I think would be really valuable In a higher ed context too. That was something that I in previous Uh positions had run into a lot. We're like, hey, we're doing this thing. But like How do we direct people to it? You know, how do people know about it? And I honestly think a newsletter is not a bad way because it's um You know, you don't have to like send an email To say all the faculty every month being like, hey, remember we have a knowledge base for this Um, he's like, you can make it more fun than that, right? You can say, hey, we're adding to this Here's some cool stuff that's going on and make it a more of a community feel Rather than sending an email and says don't forget to check the knowledge base every single month, right? Obviously you wouldn't do that Um, but it kind of serves that function, right? It does remind people about what things are available to them Um in a really important way that isn't I think just relevant for like a business like us, right? Like I think it's relevant for a lot of different contexts. So yeah, definitely and I really like it Basically for all the reasons that you're saying of it's Really useful for just reminding people that there are resources out there that Maybe they forget about sometimes. I think that's really Probably my favorite part about the roundup is just knowing that it is a way to Help people connect with information that's going to be really probably pretty useful for them even if they Don't remember that it exists And now they do and also As you said much more friendly and approachable than being like please remember that we there's a place you can go to look stuff up Please please go look stuff up there. It's like no There's lots of stuff. It's a magical adventure where you can find lots of new things And also maybe the question that you had will also be there Yeah We don't have a ton of time left the main the last Full at point that I had Is just about publishing So I've gone through most of our process by now By which I mean there's the collation. There's organizing it writing it up which I can't Really teach in a one-hour workshop inserting gifts and images we use giffy as our source of gifts and we insert them using the image tools that taylor showed you earlier in the editor Proofreading and link checking is the moment when You would go and make sure that the permalink is what you want it to be and not something else And also you send it to a couple of your colleagues and you say hey Can you please check this over and make sure that it makes sense? Is there anything that needs to be revised? If there's an announcement that needs to be sent out and you have language for that Can you send that to me and I'll put it in? Um The mailing list stuff is the last step before publication, but that's not something we're covering this week That's going to be next week with jim Uh And then the last steps for us are basically to hit publish and then put out a tweet that says by the way If you're not subscribed, but you do follow us on twitter. This is published. Go check it out There's actually another ghost article that sort of goes with the one that I was talking about earlier. Um That's uh, what is it called? It's like the complete checklist for It'll be in the week the weekly resources. Let me go find it. It's uh The it's a pre and pre publishing and post publishing guide for new writers newsletter checklist Yes, that exactly uh And it's I think pretty useful as a reference point. I would not use it as like a a tutorial um Because one they're talking about their process And two we talked earlier about how ghost makes some assumptions about what you want to accomplish with your newsletter Uh, so the pre publishing checklist is pretty Standard, uh, it's a little bit different depending on you know, what your workflow is ours is similar But not exactly the same the post publishing checklist specifically uh is Assumes that you really want to grow your audience and possibly even monetize We don't do that the point of the roundup is not to grow the audience bigger and bigger It's to get the information out to people that we already work with so again keeping in mind your goals and what you want to accomplish Is a lot more important than following the checklist that ghost has put out for you. Um making sure that What you want to be doing and what you are doing aligned with each other is better We're running up so close to time. Is there anything else that I'm missing? Uh that I need that you think we should hit right? I think that's good. Um, I do like this checklist. I mean obviously um, you know, they're they're Writing this with the angle of like maybe you have paid subscribers right to your to your newsletter um, but a lot of that stuff is Good to at least look at or period to think about right like the idea of Draft a couple social media posts to promote it. Yeah. Um, that's probably a really good idea. Um and also very Again very translatable advice, right? Yeah, even if you're not going to do that like in our case We do draft a social media post and and send it out In fact, it's usually two because we usually have one that's like Roundup coming out today like soon and then it comes out and they do it again, right? Um, the uh But I could see again if if you're on a college campus I could see that taking many different forms, right? Like maybe you do social media Maybe you have Some other place where you put it, right? Like maybe uh, like a campus email Spot or I don't know posters. I don't know if you want to advertise a newsletter on posters But my my point is like it's something worth thinking about is like, okay, you do have to get people here as well What do you have available to you? What tools do you have to promote this? Um, regardless of if you're going to monetize it or not You probably want the right people to be reading it at the very least, right? So, yeah, how do you get that in front of those people? Yeah, that's a really good point and I didn't mean to be like and also it doesn't matter how you get your audience ghost is just wrong it's more that I Get frustrated with I think a lot of their stuff is written Like it's very very translatable. You're right. I do think that when you're reading ghost stuff You do want to keep in the back of your mind that ghost has a really particular image of who their user base is Oh, yeah, and and that's 100 true. I've criticized them before I think it I like I do not like that They're tagline on their website is yeah turn your audience into a business I get it I get it what they're trying to be is like, hey, you don't got to use substack. They want to be substack Yeah competition you they're saying hey, we're an open source Version of of that platform. We're something that you can install and control and and do all that. That's great. I love that So I get that angle on it, but um on the other hand like it's it's kind of a gross Sounding thing when you know what they mean. I think it's not the intention isn't bad but Yeah, it that that is how they're doing it and I think it's a smart move because they're a tiny Relative to WordPress. They're an absolutely Miniscule project, right? So they're latching on the one niche and saying hey, this is something we can focus on do really well Do better. I think this does Newsletters better than anything I've found Just by the simple fact that it is focused on it, but it's still open source and it has enough ability to customize it and change it that you're not going to run out of Capability with it, right? Like something like substack where Exactly you're gonna use their couple themes and that's it, right? Like, you know, and that's not yeah, this is extendable. This is Something that you have control over in a lot of different ways. So Yeah, I get it but But but yeah, that is a good point though to keep that in mind that that is something that they're very focused on And a lot of their writings can be yeah in that direction It's not bad advice. You just have to make sure you're reading it with a filter Cool. Well, we've gone a little bit over time anything else you want to cover before we say goodbye to everybody No, uh much like the roundup this got longer than I anticipated it being So goes yep But it was a lot of fun. Thank you. See y'all next week. See you next week. Bye