 Welcome. We're live prerecorded. Live, Jason, exactly. So where this is the third and final instance of the Ghost Flex course where we're talking about all things ghost, which has been fun. I just came from a session where I was listening to you pilot pontificate around what it means to write and creatively think through a newsletter as you posted out. And that was awesome. Really kind of a lot of takeaways like a month is a good timeline. So you don't feel so crunched like weekly and thinking through a chronology in a narrative for each one. It's it was great stuff. Yeah, I had a really good time thinking about and that's something that I reflect on sort of at the end of every month because I always go, oh, man, what do I do? What am I doing? And so having the opportunity to talk it through with Taylor, I think was really valuable to be able to put it into words more succinctly. We did run over time because I brevity is not my strong suit. But yeah, you're not into the old brevity thing, which is not really for me. I like it's like, I'm clocking 1700 to 2200 words of newsletter. Brevity is not my thing. It's longer. It's gotten longer. I I tried to I don't remember what the stat is for what the stat was for the Halloween newsletter, but it was over 2200. That's for sure. I'm you know me like I love that. My blog posts are totally like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but I can't help it. And that's, you know, you got to be what you are, right? It's the fun part. Yeah, it's true. Say what you got to say. I also liked your point and we'll jump into our topic for this week because it is very focused. But before we get there, I also liked your point about consistency and marketing and for anyone who's thinking about using ghost and playing with this tool like I found it's a very useful tool and the reason why I even did reclaim or have the idea for reclaim roundup that ultimately pilot you ran with was that we could do that regular outreach to our community and have that consistency monthly is manageable. It's also a good kind of reflection point, but it's just important just for connecting with a broader community to do it on the regular and that has been the gold of reclaim roundup in a lot of ways. And I think the gold of ghost and newsletters. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I appreciate that. So how do you do that? Right? Like I still think email is the killer app in a lot of ways as some people say and that means like you know, a lot of us, you know, I wouldn't say my kids in the same way, a lot of us adults who go to like work somehow email or some email substitute like Slack becomes the means by which we organize, read, you know, share do business and other ways. And I think newsletter is caught on because that's something that shows up in your email and chances are people are going to basically read it or at least see it whether they read it or not is another question. Yeah, definitely. So one of the key pieces of ghost is setting up the newsletter to be cleanly emailed not only so that people receive it, but it doesn't get spammed or blocked. So that's what we're going to spend this session on is really kind of digging in a little bit on email settings for ghost and how that works. Are you ready? I think I'm ready. I will say that every single time you and Taylor talk about this, I go, that's nice. That sounds good. So I'm very prepared to learn today. I don't know how much I'll be able to contribute on the technical side of things. Well, it's funny you should say that because one of the things that I think was a really big learning curve for me back in 2014 13 when Tim first turned me on to ghost and we first started playing with it is like he was like, okay, it's a blog platform, but you can't manage your email through it. You have to set up email separately. And like for me running WordPress for all these years, I was like, God, that's a deal breaker. Like how the hell would you do that separately? And why would you? Because the thing about lamp that's nice or C panel is when you install WordPress, it also takes care of all the settings for SMTP and sending out, you know, invites or new user emails, all that stuff. A lot of the next generation apps that are not run in lamp environments, you have to do that separately and you have to use a tool like mail gun, which is called a transactional email service. And effectively what this does is it allows you to point, you know, parts of a domain to an email service so that you can send a lot of emails without getting spammed or junked and it allows you to basically communicate with a broader audience, a little bit more seamlessly because if you tried to do the same thing from a shared hosting account or from just about any email chances are it would start to get blocked or you'd be put on lists or you would go to spam and defeat the whole purpose of your newsletter. Shared hosting also has some issues, not issues, but it does have limits on how many emails you can send at a time just because the amount of resources that that would need and the degree to which you would get blocked. You don't want that impacting other people. Exactly like we have to talk to people all the time I reclaimed to say look, we limit it to 50 an hour and the reason we do that is if we start sending out tons of email to people and it's, you know, we get on lists and those blacklists effectively target our IP and say this IP is not good for email. It's a bigger question around email of like, do you self host email? That's not what this session is about, but it kind of could easily go down that road to ask the bigger question of why do we use Gmail or Proton or whatever third party service to run email is it's because it's hard and the way it's all set up is chances are sooner or later if you host your own email, it's going to get blacklisted and you're not going to be able to send anything and then it's like mission critical email down the drain. Let's let's let's host a flex course in the future about how to set up your own personal email server. Yeah, or not ever to. Yeah. Why you should never set up your own person. It's one five minute session. Exactly. We should really do a session on why it's become next to impossible to set up your own email server. Because I think that's it's not truly the case, but you know, we use Gmail and Google workspace because if we didn't, we would be chasing down emails for much of our year. So don't want to do that. Okay, so I am terrified everybody. Let's go. Exactly. So I am going to actually show you. This is fun because Baba Ghost is a is a space that I've been using since 2014 when I first started playing with Ghost and first started really trying to figure out and the hardest thing about figuring out was the email piece. And so this has been hosted in AWS. It's been hosted in it's been hosted in digital ocean and now it's hosted in reclaimed cloud very comfortably. So this blog has been my kind of experimental space for Ghost for years. And you all have looked at it already, but this is the back end of Ghost. I have a mighty three members on the Baba Ghost because this really isn't like a public thing. It's just something I've been using to play with. But I've also figured out a lot for the roundup through playing with this for a while. And let's see if this looks better. Ooh, that might see. I can kind of chassis. Yeah, I do love the interface. Do I call it elegant? I think it's what I call elegance. I feel like I've heard the word elegant from you once or twice. I do think it's very elegant. Thank you. So in Ghost, you'll see something that we'll talk about members and these are people who subscribe. And then also if you go down here and I'm not blocking it good, you'll see a bunch of settings and your name tag is my name. Oh, is it? Yeah, I'll turn them off. It's fine. Okay. My the one you'll want to be concerned with for the purposes of this is email newsletter. Right? This is the settings for the email newsletter and one of the things that confuses people. So I do want to take a second and maybe I'm going to make this a little bigger because it might be a little small. But one of the things you might want to look at when you look at the email newsletter is the mail gun configurations, right? It's going to have that right here. And if you expand it, it's just basically what's the mail gun domain and we'll look at that in a second. And then what's your mail gun private API key? So those are two things that the only two things at least from the interface that ghost needs to send an email. The confusing piece for part is there's a whole bunch of what are SMTP settings that we need when we set up ghost so that ghost can send email cleanly. And this is where if you're going down this road, it's worth talking about a little bit because there's two ways to send ghost and email. I mean email and ghost. One is using the node maller. The node maller is a built-in email service that came a few years ago. It wasn't there in 2014 where they actually have node code that can send very simple emails. But the ghost folks say do not use the node maller to send this out to thousands of people because it won't work, right? And so you'll hit a hard limit. So they encourage you as soon as you set up your ghost instance to get a mail gun account and that's the one they kind of you can use other ones and I'll talk about that a little bit later but mail gun is the one they kind of have documented and they suggest to actually send out for us like 600 emails at the end of the month, right? We want to make sure those emails get delivered and hence mail gun is the transactional service that we're using for that. So let's take a look at mail gun because I think that's worth looking at in some detail. So this is mail gun. I use it. This is not reclaims mail gun. This is my personal mail gun account. I use this for my blog for some of the ghost stuff and then you'll probably see if I go here. There's a couple of applications. Mastodon is one that would use transactional email. Part of this that is not new. I played with Mastodon back in like 2018-19 and it was it was a deal breaker. I have returned to it recently. Maybe not a deal breaker. Discourse is another application that uses transactional email. I'm using BavaTuesdays.com is the transactional email account I'm using or domain I'm using for BavaGhost and this is important here because what mail gun wants to know from you when you go and you start fresh they want to know what what domain will you be sending email from and they ask you that because they're going to say we're going to have to set up the settings for that domain to work with mail gun. So you should as you're getting ready to kind of go down the newsletter rabbit hole think about what domain will you be using to send mail for me. BavaTuesdays.com I just used to address ghost at BavaTuesdays.com they recommend often using a subdomain so maybe you could use ghost.BavaTuesdays.com that's up to you but you have to decide on a domain through which you'll send an email. So that's first right once you decide on that and this is the hardest part I think about mail gun frankly is the interface you'll see here I'm in the dashboard and then it has something called reporting which you kind of see here that's kind of reporting all the different emails I got sent over the last few days etc right and then you'll have something called sending and this is actually really where you want to be you'll notice when you click on sending it has overview right and it's going to show me all the emails that were sent and then it has domains. You can link several domains to a single mail gun account for example I have gym.reclaimhosting.com BavaTuesdays.com social.ds106.us which is the more recent Mastodon so these are all different domains that I'm using to send transactional email right Mastodon the transactional email is when you sign up for my Mastodon server it's going to have to send email and to do that it needs a service like mail gun because emails not built in same thing by and large with ghost although ghost did because it was having problems probably have a kind of failback node mail or that will send out very simple emails like password resets or signups etc but not send out the newsletter so that's another point where you could get confused so notice nodemailer simple transactional emails back and forth password signup mail gun big transactional emails where you're sending out hundreds if not thousands of emails to people who are subscribing to your newsletter so that's a distinction worth making. Finally, what domain are you going to use? I'm using Bob a ghost or yeah, I call it Bob a ghost as my example. So the domain I'm using is Bob a Tuesdays. The domain is ghost that Bob a Tuesdays.com. I'm just using the main domain and you'll notice this will say here's all the email set and that's the overview but when I go to the domains what I really want to see is the settings for that domain right? I want to go here to that domain setting because once I go there and it's a little buried but once I go there I'll be able to get that key information you need to set up your domain for mail gun that is the DNS records the DNS records are going to be records that you're going to add to wherever your domain is managed. For example, you could manage your DNS records for your domain in C panel and so you would go in you would add a text record and then you'd put in the host name and then you put in this value V equals SPF one. So that's all here and these are both tax records so you would add these two tax records in your DNS and then here you would add to MX records. Those are the mail exchange servers. So it's basically saying oh I'm not going to send mail through C panel anymore. I'm going to point them at mail gun and send all the mail through mail gun servers. That's the ticket right there and then finally if you want to track opening of emails you would add this C name record which is email.BavaTuesday. So these this is the glue in wherever you're hosting your domain to go in and edit those DNS records with a couple of tax records a couple of MX records and a C name. So that is something that you'd have to go into C panel and point not that's not something that you can only handle through mail gun. That's something that you would have to do either in the zone editor in C panel or if you have the DNS management tools in for us the client portal. If you're hosting your domain in Cloudflare right you have it running through Cloudflare you would do it there. If you have it running in Namecheap you would do it there. If you have it running wherever that domain is registered and the DNS records are being managed for many of our clients at C panel. But if it's you know Cloudflare wherever you would go in and add these records and they verify very quickly but there'll be a button to say verify verify and then it will say yes those records are being read and once those records are connected then you can proceed to send email through mail gun. That's the glue that connects whatever email domain you're using and the account in mail gun. Is that clear? Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Nailed it. All right so that's the most probably one of the most confusing pieces because when you go into Ghost you see API key you know domain I'm all set. It was easy. What do you want from me? And then you never send out any email. It's this piece that's going to allow you to link that domain and then you'll get the API key to put into Ghost. So next step killing it SMTP credentials. So you did all this you got it right. And so once you make this connection what mail gun does is says you're connected. We're basically like friends now. So let me give you something as a house warming gift and what they give you as a house warming gift is SMTP credentials and these SMTP credentials are basically the credentials you need to send email through Ghost for your newsletter. So these are important. They give you the default login and these are the credentials that you're going to add to Ghost when you set it up and reclaim cloud and I'll show you that in a second. You're going to add the login. So there's postmaster at BabaTuesdays.com. That's the one I use. It will pretty much be postmaster at whatever domain you have right. So it's pretty much if you use you know pilot Erwin it will be postmaster at pilot Erwin.com whatever it is that will be it. You'll have a little button here to reset your password which you will do and then copy that password because that's going to be your SMTP password and you'll need it and then you have your SMTP setting. This is basically like your host name and that's right here SMTP.mailgun.org and that's pretty much always the case. They do have like a European one versus American one. We default in our setup to SMTP.mailgun.org. Right. Forget the Europeans. That's they're not our concern. GDPR put a rift that we'll never get over. I wish we had GDPR. I think that'd be nice. I know. Old blog posts somewhere. I think I wrote them for a job I had in college. So they're definitely not on my blog. We all love the Europeans. They are so very progressive. Can we live in Italy? You can't complain. And we proceed now. Yes. Actually, I did have a question which is you're hosting this on a subdomain. No, you're hosting it on Baba Ghost and then you're using a subdomain of Baba Tuesdays and then there's also email subscription to your WordPress. How does everything not crash? Yeah, so keep in mind my WordPress is being run through. I'm not really running my WordPress stuff through mailgun. So BabaTuesdays.com is the domain I'm using just pretty much for ghost. If I wanted to do a separate one for WordPress, I would probably do a subdomain like WordPress.BabaTuesdays.com. And if I had another one like I did my own mastodon on Baba Tuesdays, it would be mastodon.BabaTuesdays.com. And so I would break things down by subdomains. I got lazy with ghost and didn't do it. I just used the main domain. But if you, but it doesn't run into conflict if you had to say get a password reset or something from your WordPress. No, not if it's separate domains. No, okay. So and that's why they recommend you use subdomains for this. So and a lot of these emails are just going to show up as you know sent from but I'll show you because it doesn't have to the email you chose here. The email domain doesn't have to be the sent from email. They can be different. So I'll show you that in a second. And then finally the port you'll use in the port we default default to and I think ghost also recommends and mailgun recommends is 587. So that's going to be of these ports. The one that we use by default is 587. I don't think that will change much. But if you're, if you're having port problems, you can try 25 or 465 as well. Okay. Okay. We're almost there. Next step, next tab. Can I get the next tab please? Why yes, you can Mr. Groom. I can't help you with that. You're on your own. Exactly. It was a rhetorical question. This is actually the thing that mailgun, I mean that ghost was asking of mailgun. They were asking for this sending API key. And you'll notice here under Bava Ghost, I have an API key. I think this is just the key ID. It's not the actual key. The actual key is longer and secure. And once you copy it, it's like, that's it. If you lost it, create a new one. Yeah. So this is not the key. I'm not worried about giving any way, but you can always add a new sending key or recreate it right here for this domain. And so I created one for Bava Ghost. And you didn't want it to be Bava Ghost 2 or something like that. Or I would delete this one and just create a new one. Okay. So that's all my settings. So great. We got the SMTP settings, right? We got the DNS records that we have to add. Then the SMTP settings and finally the API sending key. So this is where mailgun can be a little bit when you're doing it for the first time, you're like, oh, that's a bunch of steps. But think DNS, make the connection. Then mailgun invites you in and gives you the house warming gifts, which is your SMTP credentials. And as you're leaving, they give you a little going away party bag, which is your sending API key. You will never forget that now. I don't think I will actually. This is a pretty good analogy. Just took a second to lock it in. All right. So let's go back to Ghost and I want to show you something. Got it. For the folks who are taking this flex course and are playing around, this might look familiar. This is Reclaim Cloud. And I, as an example, put an instance of Ghost that's fresh to look at together because you'll have gone in, you'll have loaded Ghost and Ghost will run. But at the point where you're like, okay, now I got to figure out this beast known as email, now we'll go look at that. I'm going to assume and this might be wrongfully, but I also have a blog post that I'll link with this during the live session that you have done the DNS stuff. So I'm going to assume you've added the two text records. You have added the MX records and you've added the C name. So you've done that wherever you wherever you are. Exactly. You've done that. Right. We're going to assume that. So once you've done that, you now have the SMT credentials. Right. And so if you click on these add ons, you'll see this is Taylor's Ghost installer. You can update Ghost here, which is brilliant. You can map a domain. Great. Right here is the mail setup. And if you go to configure here, this is all of those things that we had talked about. Now this fills in your email, which for me is not going to be necessary because it's going to be a different email and that might be the case for many folks. But I can now put in the stuff I want, like newsletter or just basically the from address is an address I'm just making up because this can be from whatever address I want because it's just basically what's going to go in the email from the actual address is going to be postmaster at babatuesdays.com. That address we add in the S. So that is also the username. I imagine that the domain on that does have to match. Yes, because otherwise, you know, spoofing, getting in trouble. You would want to keep it. Otherwise you would have confusion and it might get junked right or spammed. So password, I'm just going to put in anything here, but that will be your long secure password. The host name is interesting because this starts to get to the stuff we talked about, right? SMTP dot mail gun dot org. I told you there could be one different if you're in Europe, but we default to this one. The port is 587. You see how all these are mapping directly on those mail gun SMTP and then service and transport are always the same SMTP so really the key pieces, the things that pretty much are always the same as port service, transport host and the from address can be whatever you want. The really important pieces are username, postmaster at whatever domain you set up and the password, which is something you reset and will have kept. Once you've done that, you click apply and all of these settings are essentially written to the environment file, which basically tells ghost. Here's the setting for sending mail for this account. That's it. Now, because I am, if nothing else, Thara, I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you. I wonder how many people get that reference. I'm going to show you something. Okay. Can you see this very well and know? I can see it fine. I think bigger is probably be good. I'm using BB edit and they don't have a really nice way to zoom in well. Yeah, that looks that's good. I think as long as people are watching this at full screen, it'll be okay. Yeah. So you may want to go to full screen and I might even go bigger just so that I can click to it easily. So you have this is the environment file, right? So you have the URL, which is being set for you automatically, the less encrypt details, the database details and none of these are my original credentials. And then finally that mail config in the environment file is being written right here. Mail from mail host mail user. When you're entering those fields in that add on, you're pushing them to an environment file that you can edit that's on your server and reclaim cloud. So that's exactly what that file looks like. Now, if you wanted to find that file, I'm going to show you this the exit full screen, get rid of that and then go back to my handy dandy add on and then I am going to make myself smaller. We know how to do that, right? You need to like magic. Yeah. Snap your fingers. I'm going to go in here and I'm going to show you that there is a way like with C panel has the file manager. There's a way in ghost where you can go in and you can actually edit that environment file. Should you need to the add on is the idea is that you don't have to. You just put it in the add on you walk away. Should anything go wrong or you need to like look in deeper in reclaimed cloud. There is this file manager and let me show you how I got there again because I think I went a little fast. You go here to the wrench. You click there and then in there you can go to the main file and the ghost instances automatically installed in root and a folder known as ghost. So if I double click on the ghost folder. I will see a couple of files. I'll see the ghost data through all my data stored. I'll see the ghost database. That's right. That's where my database is stored and then finally I'll see a Docker compose file as well as this ENV file. If I open this ENV file, it's going to actually show me just what I showed you in that text doc. I'm not going to open it because it has my original details, but this is where you would go if you had to and edit some of the files on ghost. Yeah, one thing is once you edit anything on a file on ghost restart the server and you would do that here. You would just click here and do a hard restart and just wait a minute or so and it will come back. Yeah, and that's the sort of thing that you can edit both in the reclaimed cloud file manager and if I think I saw a download option. So if you wanted to pull it into the text editor. Yeah, yeah, although it's got a nice editor in that little config space. So you probably would be fine just editing there saving it and then restarting the container. Yeah, I am thinking though would be maybe worth downloading a copy if you wanted to have that saved if you're not editing it in the very good recommendation. Copy that original config file in case you mess anything up. You can paste it back in and you're done and it's not called a config file. I'm sorry. It's called an ENV file, right? But I have mentioned it and I do want to just go back to it is I have written a bit about this on a blog. You may have heard of it. Baba Tuesdays and really don't I see it. I see it 17 times a month for the roundup. Thank you. So this actually goes through piece by piece and there are better app. There are better guides out there, but this was along the process of of getting this up. But this talks about the email newsletter settings. This talks about all of these settings. This was before though. Taylor had come up with this handy dandy add-on that let you do mail right from there. So in some ways it is a resource but Taylor's guide really takes you through the whole thing very brilliantly and we'll link to that as well and that's in our documentation. So I'm final point. I think I will make on this and I think I'm going to turn it back to you to see what I've missed because I'm sure there's much, but I do think that the one thing is when you go back into your ghost, right? Let me go back to ghost. Sorry. Yeah, go here. So when I go back in the ghost, I'm going to go back to where we started. The two things you'll put into ghost are the domain you're using. In my case, BobaTuesdays.com, the region, which by default is usually the US, but if you choose EU because you're in the EU, make sure you change that here and make sure your host name is SMTP. I think it's like, I have to look it up now, but I think it's like SMTP. Yeah, exactly. Mailgun.com, I think it might be SMTP.eu.mailgun.com or some variation. Yeah. So check that and make sure you have the right one. And then finally, that's that private API key. That was the going away gift, the little party bag as you were leaving, right? And that's the last piece that this will link you to, but what people get confused is they go here. They say, oh, wait, I don't see my API key in Mailgun. It's like, yes, because you have to A, link DNS, B, get the SMTP credentials, and then C, get the party going away gift. You have to go to the party to get the party bag. I mean, it makes sense. Otherwise, you're just a terrible party guest. That's exactly how I feel. Yeah. So that's my weird, but hopefully useful breakdown of setting up mail for ghosts to actually do what I think ghosts does so well is create a kind of regular newsletter where you can communicate. And then I haven't gotten into it, but I would say once you have this setup, you can actually choose varieties of newsletters within your ghost. You can have, I'm going to do a weekly roundup. You're going to want, this is one goes out to certain subscribers once a month. Like you don't have a one newsletter fits all. You can fit different categories based on different types of subscribers because ghost has pushed towards like paid subscribers versus free subscribers for premium content. We don't really get into that. Everything for us is free. We send it once a month. We really have simplified that process, but you can go as deep and as complex as you want. And if you want to go that route, there's a bunch of stuff you can ask us more, but it's not like one newsletter and you're done. You can have varieties of newsletters. Yeah, I think that is, that was super helpful for me in terms of understanding just how all of that works because that is forever. Something where saying, oh, something will break makes it sound like we have problems all the time. But I remember a couple months ago, there was that issue of we hit a certain, I was going to say threshold. It was really more of a ceiling where we had a certain number. I think it was like 500 people as our subscribers and we hit like 501 and it goes through a tantrum. And I remember that you and Taylor were working through that, trying to figure out what was going on, what was wrong. And I was sitting there in slaco and that's a lot of terms that I'm, I know the broad concepts of them, but not the practicals. So this was great. I understand things now. I love understanding things. It's like my third favorite thing. That's good. Rank's pretty high then. And I would say behind reclaim and then the newsletter, right? Then it's understanding. Yeah, and then it's black tea. But it's interesting because really the issue that we ran into with that ceiling, as you said, is was a database issue. The database was basically not able to send out more than 500 in the original Docker instance we used. And that was an issue that was a legacy issue as soon as we switched the instance to my SQL, not using, I forget it was, I don't know if it was post gray or it was another SQL that I'm forgetting right now, but it actually worked fine. And so none of these settings actually caused any of that. It was really just a database choking at anything more than 500, which was such a random, but hard limit. Yeah, it was weird. Exactly. Very, very strange. But we solved it. Yeah, you entirely solved it. I'm not taking credit for that. I did, I did a different chunk of that work. I think that's an interesting instance of where a problem becomes a solution in that that forced us to say, okay, let's find another Docker setup that works and us is Royal here, Taylor and he went out and he found a new Docker instance that allowed him to build on the add-ons, which I really love. I talked specifically about the mail add-on for ghost, but the domain add-on and the upgrade add-on are equally powerful to make it simple to use. Those look huge. Yeah, yeah. Great. I'd say there's one more thing that I think that we should touch on, which is saying it's technical makes it sound like it's in the same league as what you've been showing us. Let me grab the window that I want to show, which is how to actually import your members into ghost once you've got everything set up. Good point. Yeah. So I set this up in a flurry this morning because I remember that we hadn't done that or that we might need to do that rather. So this is sort of behind the scenes. It's ghost mail. It's very, very fast. But what you would do, and this is the almost nearly the last step that we do before we send out the roundup is, I mean, there's nobody here, but what you would do is import from CSV. I mean, I guess you could add them manually, but you know, it's kind of a pain. And then I grabbed some junk data basically from our state you instance. And it's really pretty simple. I've it'll pull in every single field and try and tell what everything is. It I always stripped down the CSV to just name an email because that's all we need. There may be other things that you want to track, but it's not super useful. Every single email in this CSV is email at email.com. So I have no doubt that ghost is going to throw a tantrum when I try and import this. But I would say, okay, I want this field to be the name for some reason ghost doesn't recognize that, but whatever. And then there's some other stuff that you could include, but we're not going to do that. If you wanted to label these members, you could say start-up members or we we re-import people every month. So we could say October import or something like that. I don't usually keep track of that because I don't think it's necessarily valuable data, but you know, if that's something that you want to track, you can. One thing that's also worth noting is that you can import someone as a member and they'll receive emails and then maybe they come in and unsubscribe. That doesn't remove them from the members list. It means that they don't receive emails, which is good in its way because every month we're importing the same CSV, but maybe it's gotten a little bit longer. Importing the CSV will update their contact information. It matches, I believe, based on email, but it won't reset their status. So it's just awesome because there may not be people who like, oh, you unsubscribe or re-subscribing you. Yeah, it's if it fully deleted them from the database, it would then every time we re-imported, they'd say, I unsubscribed. Why am I getting these emails again? But as it is, it just says, oh, yeah, I know that person. Okay. I'll check if there's anything that needs to be changed. Nothing needs to be changed. Let's just get that all up to date. So I'm going to hit import this and there's no useful data. We're going to see, oh, it worked. Oh boy. Oh, no, it only uploaded one person because it's the same email on every single thing. That's fine, but that is the process by which you would import members into Ghost. And that's honestly much simpler. I don't know, much simpler. I've never tried to import members into WordPress. I'm sure there's a way to do it, but I don't know it. This is like, I was going to say, like it's funny when, you know, being technical is always a matter of perspective. I can do the mail gun stuff, but as soon as it comes to the imports, I'm so afraid to mess something up that I stay away from them. But it's just, I want to note when we started this, like just how easy the ghost and quick the ghost CSV importer, and it's such a cool thing to know from you that they don't overwrite data. They respect the existing settings so that you're not resubscribing someone, which is super annoying if we did that month after month. It's a, it's a pretty, did I say elegant? It's a pretty elegant solution to the newsletter. One thing I also do like is, or I think it could be useful. We've not had so much cost to use it. But if there is a blank email field, if there's a blank field in general, I think, then ghost can't import that person. And at the end, they say, Hey, I missed, there were three people that I just couldn't import. Here's a file with a list of them. You can go see who's missing data in case you need to go fill that back in. Oh, yeah. And so honestly, I thought that was what I thought most would spit out when I tried to import a long list of people who all had the same email. I think what it actually did was to say, I'm importing this person. Oh, I need to update the contact data. I'm importing this person. I need to update the name change. And so it just got to the end of the list and went, this is the name of the person now. This is the only person. 139 emails later. 139 updated contacts. Everything's, yeah. But I mean literally even when it's importing 139 people or even 600 people, it's that fast. Yeah. It's so crazy how quick it is. And I really love ghost because of that. Like it's super responsive. It looks really good on the screen. I love the way the newsletter, the reclaim roundup pops when it comes into my email. I love the gifts. I love that it's, I know you want to do work on it and change the theme and I'm all for that. But I love its simplicity and elegance right now. Right. It just, it's on there. It's a nice readable page of all the goings on and then you go on, you know? Yeah. I'd say six out of 10. We're never going to stop. Don't ever going to stop. Is this, we're never going to stop teasing Taylor for that. Can I ask you now that me and you are without him? I'm so bad at rating things out 10. I feel for you a ghost. I feel guilty giving anything less than a seven. Me too. Yeah. I think I feel guilty giving anything less than a nine. I think it's, it's weird. It feels like comparing apples and oranges in terms of what I try and accomplish in WordPress versus what I try and accomplish in the roundup. I think we've been talking a lot lately about how WordPress has been adding lots of features, changing a lot of the way that it has you build posts. It has you build your pages and things like that with the new block editor and now full site editing and in some ways ghost is followed in those footsteps with the cards, which is what they call blocks, which is, you know, the paragraph, the image, whatever you're adding. But it is still, I think simpler. There's fewer options. They're you can't play around with them as much. I think the sort of drag and drop aspect of Gutenberg can be useful, but like. So I think if I wanted to build something, yeah, the idea of ghost is simple. Ghost is elegant. I could not build something elaborate in ghost full side of the theme you could. I could that the thing that happens there is WordPress is designed to have a GUI for changing your theme. Whereas to edit the ghost theme, I need to learn how to read handlebars and then be good at HTML. And being good at HTML is, you know, it's a weird bar of you can always get better and better, but it's low bar to entry. But I need to number. What is the number pilot caught me stalling? We'll say eight eight and a half. Oh, God, you the new look the next generation of reclaimers are hard graders. I ate eight and a half eight and a half. It's it's ridiculous. I don't even know what I don't even know what to do with six. I was I couldn't even focus that old session. I was confounded that he created at six. I was like six. What are we doing five minutes of this session? Still confounded. Why are we even talking about ghost if it's sex? I I like ghost. I think I like it more now that I understand your and Taylor's angle of like what's making it run behind the scenes because again, I'm more familiar with like how to debug WordPress. I have more experience with what makes that tick. And so by comparison, I like ghosts editor. I like using it every month to compile the roundup. I like that in principle, changing, coding the theme, coding my own theme would be much easier than learning PHP and doing it WordPress. I feel I have felt less comfortable with the back end and with understanding it. And now this has made me more comfortable. Think about that to a nine, I guess. Nice. Yeah, getting there. I may rub off 11 is where we should be. But I will say this though, your points are really valid and the idea of I like and I think sometimes it's the same problem we have with a lot of tools like when a tool does something well, we want it to do everything. Yeah. And I like the tool diversity of like I think of ghost. I think of a very focused newsletter for our community and that's what that does. You know, and I like that like I like the ability to kind of think across the tools and then demonstrate the tools that we have and that we can hopefully as you've done brilliantly in this flex courses kind of go through our thinking like our process of why this and how we build it and there is the tool, but then there's also our approach to it, which I think really melds beautifully with ghost as a different example from WordPress, right? Yeah. And that's something Taylor was talking about last week. The idea of he really likes the ghost editor because it's so clean and you can focus on what you're writing, you're not getting bogged down and all the other stuff and I do think that's true. I think that's really nice when I'm sitting down to write the roundup. There's much less focus on, okay, how am I going to make this layout look nice? And do I want to add like a little sidebar don't I should not add sidebars. That's going to make it even longer, but there's much less of a focus on you like you're saying you can trust the visuals of ghost to come out nicely and then you don't have to think about that while you're in the editor really. It's almost like, you know, the Moleskine like notebook of publishing like you feel real like you like it. I like what you want to write in it. You know what I mean? Like WordPress is a little bit like I like it, but it's the Trapper Keeper. It does it all, but sometimes you don't need that. And I love WordPress. Again, I can't talk smack. It'd be like biting the hand that feeds, but I do really love the writing experience in ghost. Yeah, we were talking about mail. This was the mail. This was the session about setting up email at one point. Nine. How would you rate my performance here today? 12. That's the right answer and my lucky number. Really? It's true. Hey, nice guessing. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, this was fun pilot. It's always fun to do these sessions and I hope people got something out of it. If you have questions around any of the setups, if you want a separate kind of walkthrough on the DNS settings whether in C10 or else wise, let me know. I did kind of skip that step assuming everyone might have a different feature to use, but mail gun being the consistent, but if you want something on that, just let us know. We can always provide you with that. Take a look. Yeah. Yeah. So I think this actually, this is wrapping up the flex course for the month. So yeah, also thank you everybody for just joining us on this journey. I agree. It's been awesome. Very fun. I agree. And like you said, we learned a lot also like I'm not so afraid of the import. You're not so afraid of the email. It's good for you. It's good for me. It's good for the whole family. Yeah. This rotating, this rotating hosts thing was really helpful. Exactly. It's a great idea. I don't know who had it. I legitimately don't remember anymore. You don't? No. Then I'll take credit. I did. Yeah, there you go. All right. Thanks everybody for coming. This was great. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.