 Welcome to session one of Ghost of running a newsletter with Ghost. Yeah, it was pointed out to us that this would have been a perfect one to run during October, which I'm pretty disappointed I didn't think of that, honestly. Yeah, me too. A branding, a branding, marketing, you know. We just totally missed that. Yeah, exactly. But thanks for tuning in. We're going to spend most of the month talking about ghost and newsletters and transactional email. It's going to be wild in a hopefully not scary way. That's my October tie in. That was pretty good. So we ain't afraid of no transactional email. Yes, you better not be. But yeah, so I'm excited to kind of kick this off. We're going to spend week one this session talking about sort of the fundamentals, what ghost is, where it can run, what we can do with it. We're going to install Ghost today. And we're going to poke around a little bit at the files and look at what's happened because I think that's always important to at least have some idea of what you've done with a one-click installer. And we're also then next week going to move on to talk a little bit about Ghost itself, using it, writing in it, putting a newsletter together in it, managing members and stuff like that. And then in the last session, session three, we're going to talk about the email setup portion of Ghost with using Mailgun to send out your newsletter email and get things set up and get you off to the races with a pretty simple to run manageable and cheap newsletter application that you own and control. So I'm excited. But we should kind of, you know, before we get into installing and configuring things, we should talk a little bit about what Ghost is and why we like it. Jim, if you want to guide us through that a little bit. Absolutely. So I first heard about Ghost probably around the time we started Reclaim Hosting, and that's about 2012, 2013. And I do think, if let me just bring this over here, here's their website. And one of the things, I'm just going to go small. And one of the things that, yeah, one of the things that Ghost does is when Tim Owens, you know, who is the partner here at Reclaim Hosting, was probably 2013, 2014 was like, I'm going to go and use Ghost as my new blogging platform. And this was when WordPress, you know, was still at its height. And I was like, Ghost, what the hell is Ghost? And he was like, it's an open source blogging platform. And the thing it does is it just does blogs. It's kind of like WordPress when it's started. It's simple. It's elegant. Right. There were some issues. I think you alluded to Taylor with transactional email. And it was a next generation app. So it didn't run in lamp and we'll get to that. So it had some difficulties, but it was quite elegant. It was quite simple. It was really focused. And they have built, I think, over the last 10 years have really built a more and more focused tool that kept committed to their core of making publishing very elegant and very simple. I'm not crazy. And we've talked about this before Taylor about their new tagline. And let me get my things like, turn your audience into a business. Like there is a bit of that. But one of the things I do like about them. And I think I've always really as a, as a business owner, been impressed is they're very transparent. They're very transparent about everything from the amount of money coming in, how they're investing that they're kind of cycle of reinvesting in people and reinvesting in the product. And I think as a result, they really have built a very, very kind of grassroots from the ground, core, committed open source application that's not going anywhere. And has really picked up on the power of newsletters and how that shift has happened and used it to the good. So if you have folks who want a simpler way to publish on the web or are looking at a newsletter ghost may be a very, very good open source alternative that it just so happens that Taylor built a beautifully elegant just to match ghost one click installer for reclaim cloud. So we're cooking with gas. Yeah. I'm a big fan of ghost as well. Like I, the, the whole. Taylor one to ten. How big? Well, so I, I don't know if I can, I won't be able to give an impressive number. I'm going to say six or seven. Six. Yeah. So I like ghost a lot and I used to use it for my blog. I don't use it for my blog at the moment. I use static site generator for that. But the thing I really appreciate with blogging tools in general, actually, I won't even say blogging tools with any digital tool. I really personally have a space in my heart for tools that are like, we're going to do this one thing and we're going to do it extremely well. And this is what we do. We do not do anything else. I really like that and I really appreciate that. I think in some ways tools like that can simplify these digital environments you create, right? It's not always the case because I will say the minute you grow out of what they want to do and you say, yeah, I actually want to add this on. You don't really have that option with ghost. That's one thing that WordPress does really well is like, if there's functionality that's related to a website that you want, there's probably a plugin that can do that. And that's really cool. Ghost isn't like that. Like ghost is really just for a blog or newsletter and writing a blog or newsletter. But I will say as a person who probably spends too much time looking at tools and thinking about tools, a really simple tool is really great for me to focus on the blog or the writing because otherwise I'll spend forever playing with the thing and tweaking things and not doing the actual writing part. So that's one thing I really like about ghost. I don't currently use it because I use static site generator which is almost even further in that direction in some ways. But I will say if I ever moved back to a normal CMS, it probably would be ghost because I really did how it kind of got me focused on the writing part and not the site if that makes sense. Six? I don't know. I mean like six is above average. We're not talking like let's talk about inflated grades here. Do we want to talk about that? That's like Italian grading. Everybody gets a six and they think it's good. It's got to be a 10 or an 11. I don't know. Like I like it a lot but I don't currently use it. I don't know. I guess I could say I really appreciate it. I like it an eight or nine or ten. There are things I don't like about it. Like you said the tagline grow your audience into a business I think is kind of gross. But what they're doing there is they're hitching their wagon to the newsletter thing. And I think that is a smart move the way that they have done it. They have done newsletter in a way that I think is not creepy or gross. And we're going to talk about that over the next couple of weeks. Because there are things. You could do crazy tracking things and all kinds of stuff like that. And they don't really build that into ghost which is something I appreciate. And in some ways one of the things we had talked about earlier and we will get to showing you ghosts we promise. But one of the things that's elegant about ghost but was confusing when I first started using it. And I started installing my first ghost in like 2014 on AWS. And it has you doesn't have email built in like WordPress. So you have to use an email service a transactional email service that will talk during the week three of this called mail gun. You can use others but that's what we recommend. It's quite easy. And then it doesn't really have any plugins. You talked about the themes but plugins it's all third party integration APIs just this like in the last month or two they introduced searching elastic search across their site and commenting to give you an idea. Like 10 years later they're like all right. And my my impression is that that is very like there it's it's it's opinionated software. They're like look we don't think we want to tackle comments. So here are some ways you can bring in third party tools to do commenting. And that was their stance for a long time. And you know I again I can appreciate that stance. I think now that they have built in commenting. I think that is a big deal for the usability of ghost as a simple blogging platform because most of the options to integrate comments into a ghost blog before now were kind of privacy invading or expensive. So I'm a big fan they did that as well. Frankly that that that is one thing that would maybe possibly get me back on ghost. The search thing is huge too like not having search is really rough for me on a blog. And again there are ways to do it that were like leveraging like front end JavaScript tools and or like custom search engines with Google or DuckDuckGo. But none of those are ideal in terms of making the site feel cohesive and and and being a good search. So it's really big that they brought that in admins out there who are now like oh I don't really have to worry about plugins. I don't really have to worry about updating themes a little bit but it's a far flatter structure for the yeah the way the way that language WordPress deals with them. We probably won't get super far into this on video but the way themes work in ghost I kind of think of them as more templates than themes right WordPress themes can add huge amounts of functionality to WordPress right it's running PHP code that is the theme essentially. Ghost themes are made I think they call them handlebars. Yeah handlebars and basically it's just HTML with specific little tags in there where it will parse the file and go I can put my content here and so you can think of it almost like a mail merge like a really sophisticated mail merge right. It's like a hipster handlebar mustache guys. Yeah about it like that. Can I get this? Come on. Okay now. There we go. We focused there for a little bit but the cool thing about the cool thing about those themes is they are basically only HTML and CSS so you can tweak them pretty easily and I'm not going to sit here and say that you would never need to update them you would want to update them to take advantage of like search you know new features that come into ghost but there isn't a like a code there isn't like a PHP or in this case Node is what ghost uses as its back end Node.js there isn't like that kind of code that's attached to the theme so I will say like when I use I use ghost for my blog for several years I literally never updated the theme in that time it was not a problem everyone's like if there if you want the new version of theme because it looks better install it if it doesn't just leave it it's fine so that is kind of a cool thing as well that for the most part you can be a little bit less on top of the theme updating and stuff like that I will say on the other hand though there isn't really a built-in way to update the themes you have to just upload them as zip files so it's good that you don't have to do that because it would be annoying to have to do that so it's quite a simple tool you talked about Node.js so that kind of brings us to a next point that we wanted to cover is so if you are now interested after well you're probably not because Taylor only gave it a six balance his six with my ten I'll give it an eight I'm just not a big fan of grade inflation that's all you know that's another story but so say you're interested your peak now and you're like hey I'm going to go to my cPanel and I'm going to install ghost at one point in the history of reclaim hosting you could do that because we found a way using something called cloud Linux to allow for a node package to run ghost it was very clunky it was very hard to update and it was not user friendly at all so when we started reclaim cloud one of the first things we did is we retired cloud Linux and these packages that ran ghost and discourse and other things like that so you cannot run ghost cleanly at least in reclaim hostings shared hosting environment or on domain of one zone as a cPanel instance because it's not really native to the lamp environment and that goes back to what you mentioned Taylor with node so if you want to install ghost what do you got to do you got to use reclaim cloud to do it but it's pretty easy to to install it so I'm going to switch over to share my screen here and bam so if you haven't you haven't used reclaim cloud and I got a probably have to hide our little logo here there we go so if you haven't used reclaim cloud before you will need to get an account and you can just use a sign up form if you're using a dot edu email you're good to go if you're using a different type of email address let us know and we can whitelist your email because we don't take signups from not to dot edu emails by defaults but you just let us know we can get your account whitelist we're like the early Facebook yeah yeah but like that's like only that's the only comparison I want to draw between us and after that you can go here and click the login button on reclaim dot cloud and you'll be dropped in your dashboard and so my if you have other stuff running that's cool I've got a couple different groups of environments going on here and different things but I made a fresh one for us to kind of start clean and not have a bunch of extra stuff on screen so this is probably what you'll see is you got nothing going on what we're going to use is the marketplace there are a couple of things you can do in reclaim cloud you can kind of define your own environments that have different programming languages and databases and stuff attached but we're going to use the marketplace and the marketplace is basically kind of like install a tron right for shared hosting or domain of one where it will just set up applications for you it's kind of like that for reclaim cloud so this will pre create different environments for you and install the application get you ready to go so if you click on content management and go to ghost this is our ghost installer and you can just give it a name my test ghost install I'll give it that for now so that'll be my URL for it actually I'm going to give a shorter URL let's just do Taylor ghost about that and you can pick a region any region is fine I typically pick Canada because I think that's maybe closest to my actual spot in Wisconsin data center wise I will say the it's not going to make much of a difference for for a blog site so you can pick whatever you feel like and it will get going so it's going to take a little bit here it's got to make a environment it's got to get Docker set up because we are going to use it's going to use Docker to deploy ghost and we did a whole I'm not going to talk about Docker but Docker is basically a whole system of containers that can manage the applications inside and and what programming languages are running in there and the database and stuff that's it's a lot of the magic of reclaim cloud is it's using Docker or technologies like Docker we actually had a whole course on it called understanding containers if you want to learn pretty in depth about it that would be something I would recommend but this is going to go through and create the environment and install ghost and then it's going to give you a little heads and get set up this will probably take about three or four minutes it does take a little bit longer it's not quite like install trying that way and that's because it's kind of creating it's own little server environment to run ghost and so while that goes I'm going to actually minimize this and close this I have not unlike a cooking show a one ready to pull out of the oven ready to go I even called it pull this out of the oven in Canada that we clean cloud so and you so if I click on the little environment URL here that's ghost we got ghost ready to go I will mention and I will show this in a second what this is my ongoing ghost and saw because I want you all to see what the the it's going to give you a little message and point you to documentation about ghost which is super helpful if you ever need to get to that information again you can just go to our help center our support website and just search for ghost and you'll see this running ghost on reclaimed cloud and this will have just about everything you need right in there so talks about how to install it and then it talks about how to set up ghost so just like when you want to log into wordpress you go to your website slash WP-admin or WP-login you're going to go to your website slash ghost to get your account set up and things like that so if I go back to this ready to go ghost that I just installed go slash ghost and it's going to say cool what do you want to call your site we'll call this um we'll keep going with fresh ghost install and I'll put my name in here I'll put my email address in and then I'm going to create a password I need to make it longer so once you do that you're set you've got ghost ready to go so you they have this kind of little tutorial like here's how you can write your first post and stuff like that we'll dig more into actually using the ghost dashboard and what you can do from here in a an upcoming session but there's not a lot in here honestly there's a concept of making a post you can look at which ones are drafts scheduled and already published you can make pages you can mess around and wrangle your post tags and stuff you can create other user accounts and do different design changes and things in the settings and you can also manage members which would be for your newsletter type stuff that will get into more in the future it's that simplicity though that I love I'll remove myself here in a second but like the fact that you're going into ghost and you have pages posts right and tags and then you got to deal a little bit with newsletter but like literally it is it's a breath of fresh air after like seeing that sidebar menu and WordPress get increasingly bloated in some ways WordPress is kind of like the LMS it doesn't want to be but it just keeps on taking on more and more because it's so successful and it's done what it's done so well I mean it's a greatness but like it's refreshing to come back and go okay yep I know exactly what I need to do here and it's pretty clear even without a tutorial how that's a difference that's the experience that is not a 6 it's a 9 or a 10 yeah you're going to be so I'm going to prove to you that a 6 is a good score okay it's above average maybe I'm just very pessimistic about a lot of different tools because a lot of tools rank a 1 or 2 on my list but yeah so one of the things I really like about Ghost is that it tries to keep it's opinionated so this dashboard has changed a lot over the years like my first Ghost installed looked nothing like this when I logged into it but that does I mean I think they spend a lot of time on the design of their own tools to make sure that they're relatively easy to find things so you know all of your settings and stuff are going to happen right in the settings panel and if I go to design here this looks kind of like the WordPress customizer right where you can kind of see the existing site and you can make branding changes and color changes and things like that so I really but I really appreciate how stripped down this is and relatively easy to navigate you can change themes and there are several of them built in but you can also find themes out there on the internet and upload them as zip files just like WordPress actually there isn't a whole theme store built into Ghost where you can like that store is not the right word but you know there isn't a whole theme system like in WordPress you can find almost any WordPress theme worth using right inside of WordPress and it can download them and install them for you. Ghost doesn't have that it just comes with a few built in but then you can upload them. I will say I haven't seen very many paid ghost themes most ghost themes are free and most of them are relatively simple again they're there because they're blog focused that the tool is blog most of the themes are blog focused as well but you know changing themes is pretty simple you can just pick a new one and say hey I want to use this and it will install the theme and get you ready to go. So that's getting your ghost site set up that's really only that one step which is to use the marketplace and name it I guess and you are ready to go you'll notice over here this is the ghost site I was first demoing here and this is that message you get when it's completed so it'll say hey you need to set up ghost by visiting this it also is going to talk about how do you do stuff with mapping a domain because you're probably going to want to do that almost right away right and then it links to our article we're going to talk about mapping a domain here in just a second so it says if you want to map a domain name point in a record at 51.222.233.122 then use the domain configuration add on again this is also documented in our thing so because this is not running on shared hosting or domain of one's own we do have to manually map a domain to it and we use DNS to do that but we try to make this as simple as possible you don't have to go digging through configuration files and stuff so if I go to my ghost install here this is probably what yours will look like you'll see this is the environment this is the existing this is the reclaim cloud URL it lives at this is our little server container and if I click on this little drop down here I can also find that IP address it currently has so all I really have to do is go into my cPanel and map a domain to it so you can log into any place that you can do DNS management so maybe you're doing this in cPanel because you're doing this on domain of one's own or maybe you've got a domain registered elsewhere through another registrar like cloudflare or something you can do that anywhere you can control DNS so I'm going to just log right into my website here and use cPanel to do this any of you probably will as well so I'll use the DNS zone editor and then I'm just going to make a new a record so I'm going to add an a record and we'll call this newsletter dash ghost dot jaden dot me and I'll paste in my IP address which again I found by clicking on this little node down here and copying it and I'll add an a record so it doesn't work yet so I mapped the domain but I'm getting an error so there is one more step we have to do in Reclaim Cloud so if I go back to Reclaim Cloud we have to tell ghost that it lives at this new domain and normally it's kind of a pain to do that but we've rolled this into our installer to make this really simple so if you click on the add-ons button here on your ghost server container there's a couple in here so there's one that will update ghost it'll just pull the latest version of ghost there's one for setting up mail we'll talk about that in another session and there's one to setup domain configuration and setup let's encrypt so we're going to do that we'll click the change button here and it's going to say hey please specify the new domain name the new domain should already have an a record point at the environments IP address that's what we just did so I'm just going to copy that domain here I'll get rid of the extra HTTP we just want to put the domain name and no slashes around it or anything like that and then we'll hit apply and it'll take a second it will restart ghost tell ghost this is where you live now and it will get let's encrypt to issue a certificate so if I and I may need to wait a second here it makes things a little bit to restart and also I will say if you're having any trouble like this it's possible sometimes it takes it a second to install the let's encrypt certificate so I'm going to open it up in a private window just to make sure yep so we're all good basically I jumped the gun in a few seconds so now it lives at newsletter dash ghost dot jaden dot me and that's where my ghost all will live and I can always change it if you need to you could change the DNS and point it someplace else and use that same tool again but these add ons that we've set up really make managing most of the things you need to do in ghost and it really is kind of just these three settings that you're probably going to need to mess with pretty simple you can set up your mail settings you can change your domain name and you can get ghost updated just with these three buttons here so and again all of that is also mentioned in our in our oops in our ghost article here which I will definitely link to what you can do with it you can update ghost you can it's all also update the database if you need updating you can map a custom domain and mail gun so there we go we got a ghost install and the last thing I kind of want to breeze through here quickly is what did that installer do and I just mentioned that you really don't have to do much editing of text files and things like that because the installer has these settings here but I really think it's good that you at least know where this stuff lives just so in the case you need it you know where to even look so in Reclaim Cloud you've got two kind of major options for exploring the container there's a terminal we're not going to really need that for this and there's the config button here which is kind of like the file manager in cPanel so if I click on that on our ghost server here it's going to drop me into the file system for ghost so if I go into I can do kind of two things here I can go into the root folder and then the ghost folder from here but I also have it in our ghost installer set up as a bookmark so you can just click right on ghost over on the side here and that will jump you right to where you need to go so what this ghost installer has done is it has set up docker and it has told docker all the various things we need to do to install ghost so it's going to set up a database for you it's going to set up ghost itself it's going to set up HTTPS and everything and it's all of that is defined in this docker compose file and then all of the individual settings for your ghost install like what domain name it lives at and what the mail settings are when we get to that all of that is in this .env file so if I go in here and I'll change this before next time because now I've put my database password out there but it will have your database password it'll have the URL that ghost lives at it'll have the let's encrypt domain for HTTPS purposes the email address so it will let's encrypt will automatically email you if there's some kind of problem with HTTPS and then the mail config which is down here at the bottom because we haven't done anything with that all those add-ons are really doing is changing this file for you and restarting ghost basically beyond that the database and files for ghost live in these two folders so there's ghostdb this is the database you really shouldn't touch anything ever in there but if you ever needed to migrate this to a different reclaimed cloud container or something you could theoretically copy this whole ghost folder and you'd be ready to go and then this ghost data is sort of the files that ghost uses so there's the the actual apps is empty the themes folder which is currently empty images folder oh that this is all empty because this is my second ghost install that I haven't even set up yet right so that they'll will be stuff in there once you have themes set up and various other things set up so I forgot that I'm working with two different ghost sites here jumping between the two of them so but that basically those folders will populate with the various files that your ghost site needs so it's good to I think know where these things live in case you ever have some need to make a different kind of backup or something like that keep in mind backups are built in a reclaimed cloud and happening for every container and reclaimed cloud for you but maybe you want to archive something for a longer period of time it's just good to know where your files and stuff are so that's what the installers ultimately setting up for you is it's all in that root ghost folder you're muted right now Jim I like that that config folder in reclaimed cloud kind of acts like the file manager in cPanel and so you'll notice if you were watching Taylor do that that ghost had a little star which is like this is a favorite and like you can favorite directories that you know you have to go in because each one of them is like a kind of like a server direct it is it's a directory on a Docker instance and so you can favorite those to get access to say the images or the themes if you have to upload something etc but yeah this is a really good the thing that's amazing I think though Taylor is that you've made what is potentially like the cloud has one click installs but there's always some things that get to like command line like upgrades or you know the mail when you have to go into environment and edit that or you know even the domain pointing you've created simple interfaces for this application on reclaimed cloud so that no one ever has to do what you just did which is yeah that's the goal I really want ghost to be something that literally anyone could look at that you probably would have to look at that documentation right to know like oh I got a point a DNS entry right and then click on the add ons button but that's I really want to make ghost literally as simple as we possibly can make it because to be perfectly honest running ghost yourself like when you ran it on AWS and I did something similar for a long time on I was running it I think on Digital Ocean it's not that simple to set up a lot of times like there are it's there I should say maybe not simple but you can follow the directions right but it's a bunch of steps right and if you're not comfortable with the terminal it can be a little bit scary my goal here was to make terminal unnecessary entirely for doing stuff with ghost and really you shouldn't even really ever have to go into the file manager either but I never say never when it comes to technical literacy it's always good to know where your stuff lives because someday you'll want to move it or do something you know true so I at least like to point out this is where the stuff is if you ever need to tweak something so no absolutely and I think so next session we'll be talking about going through the ghost interface what it looks like to write a post and publish a post and then talking a bit with pilot Erwin who's kind of really let up our reclaim roundup initiative where we're doing monthly newsletters for all of 2022 and beyond and talking a bit about that process and talking about yeah there it is it's so beautiful I'm talking a bit about how we've been using ghost and how we've learned a lot and built a lot on top of it as a way not only to communicate but to kind of round up the work we're doing on a monthly basis that reclaim I mean there's a lot of good that came out of our use of ghost so next session we'll be digging in to the actual tool of publishing of using it and how you would go with I'm definitely looking forward to to that yeah me too so I think we'll we'll wrap it here and see everybody next time and you know let us know throughout the week if you have any questions on any of the stuff that getting set up with ghost things like that you know a lot of this is also kind of early like the installer we haven't had that long I think I made it a few months ago so definitely I'm open to suggestions on like wording and stuff like that too like in the add-ons and you're like that's confusing doesn't make any sense to me I'll definitely take that into consideration to try to improve some of that language so I would say it's about a six right now I thank you so much that's above average Jim I'm really happy with that I don't think you are that's awesome well I will see you maybe or pilot maybe or you'll see pilot maybe I think it's pilot and I next week there you go you got lucky alright see y'all bye bye