 There we go. So, yeah, welcome to the November Community Chat. We're going to talk about Ghost, the blogging newsletter platform. And this is very much connected to related to the flex course that we're also running on Ghost, which is in its last week this week, actually just the last session just premiered. And in that session, Pilot and Jim went through all of the details and minutiae of setting up the email stuff, which can be kind of weird to get used to if you've never done it before. But if you've ever had to set up mail, like a mass mail type application manually before, you will probably appreciate how comparatively simple it is with something like MailGun and Ghost. But if you haven't, it can be pretty intimidating. So that was cool to kind of see that done. And Pilot went through like importing users and all the specific Ghost dashboard stuff there. But yeah, we've spent kind of the month or first half of the month, I guess, kind of chatting about what Ghost is, what it's good for. And I think that the conversation is timely as well for a lot of reasons. So on the one hand, it's very untimely because we really should have done this in October. That would have been an awesome Halloween themed flex course, but whatever. We didn't think of that. We weren't in the right mindset there. We were busy enough with the WordPress multi-site. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We did technically start it on October 31. And by technically, I mean I put the first blog post up. So there's that. But yeah, so in that way it was very untimely. But what I mean by that is there's a couple of things happening. And I mean, you don't have to go far in our community chat, history backlog of recordings to find people saying, you know, WordPress is changing in these ways. There's been people who have been concerned about some things. I don't really personally like putting up tools, like standing them up against each other and being like, yes, you should move from this to this. Because like, one of the things we explore a lot throughout this course, and we'll talk about today is like, ghost doesn't do the same things as WordPress. It really does like one, maybe two things. It does those things, I think, very well. And that's it. Whereas WordPress has, as we all know, I think a ton of functionality, a lot of different things you can do with it. It runs in almost any environment. Ghost is very specific requirements needed to run it. So there's all kinds of different things that I don't think make sense to compare it in like a checklist way, but do maybe make sense to think of it in a more like, well, how does this application fit into my ecosystem of tools that I may want to use for a purpose? Not so much a technical showdown, if that makes sense. So that's kind of how I like to think of it. I think ghost is an interesting thing to know about. And we're trying a lot, spend a lot of time here at Reclaim, making it easier to use, easier to run, cheaper to run too, and all kinds of stuff. So before we get into some more of the, my new shit and things, and while we kind of kick the conversation off, I did want to just kind of take a step back for a second and kind of share my screen and just chat a little bit generally about what ghost is and what it's good for. So let me just share my screen here. Cool. So if you're not familiar, ghost is a blogging tool, not unlike WordPress in some ways. One of the ways it is very similar to WordPress is that it is open source, but there is a company behind it that sells hosting for it as well. So they have a service called Ghost Pro, where you can sign up for a blog that they host. And one difference, though, with Ghost Pro is there's no free option for it. It starts at about $9 a month to host with them, but it is a somewhat limited feature set for that $9 a month. Again, kind of like WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress.com is simple to get started with and you can for not too much money map a custom domain, but it doesn't start with all the functionality you can get in the full-blown self-hosted WordPress. But there is that kind of natural similarity between the two. The one thing to know about right off the bat is Ghost has a very specific way and places you have to run it in. So WordPress will run on pretty much anything lamp environment. That's why we can run it on domain in one's own and shared hosting. To run WordPress, you need a modern version of PHP, a web server like Apache, and a database that needs to be MySQL or MariaDB. Although I was actually watching recently an interview with Matt Mullenweg and it sounds like WordPress might be getting support for SQLite as a database in the future, which is kind of interesting, but it would be like a lower performance thing. I'm not really sure why you'd want to use SQLite, but I guess options are good. So Ghost, on the other hand, has specific requirements. Officially, they support it on Ubuntu and these specific versions, these are all the long-term support versions. You need to use MySQL as your database. They used to support SQLite, but they actually dropped support for that just recently. You need Node.js, and it also has to run as like a system service. So the system service thing and Node.js is kind of why we can't really in a clean way offer it in shared hosting. There was a time where we were using a tool called Cloud Linux to enable that, but speaking as someone who used Ghost on Cloud Linux, it was very difficult to maintain and I never successfully upgraded it. I just never quite figured it out. So it wasn't really a great fit, even when it could kind of work. Also performance was pretty rough in that. So for that, we turn to Reclaim Cloud where you can kind of have a lot more flexibility in what you run, and we made an installer. So we have documented in our support knowledge base, whoops, I do. We're all here. We do have documented in our support knowledge base how to get started with Ghost on Reclaim Cloud. If this is something you want to try out, we have an installer. You really just go sign in to Reclaim Cloud, go to Marketplace, click Ghost, name your environment, and then it's going to kind of take you from there to this page we're looking at right now and say, all right, you need to map a domain name and there you go. So everything else updates, setting up mail for newsletters, and changing your domain name, doing HTTPS stuff. All of that is kind of handled for you and you can go in the add-ons menu to configure it. So you really don't need to use a terminal at all. It's kind of the goal, which is very much not the case for most ghost hosting. Usually, you could run Ghost on AWS or DigitalOcean, but you will have to kind of manually administer it via the command line, which isn't the end of the world, but really trying to make this as simple as possible to use. So that's kind of how we would recommend people run it I recently did some work with our installer to really tune the amount of memory it uses. So it uses about three cloudlets on a new install, which means it would run about nine bucks a month, and then you need an IP address. So that's another $3. So it's like just under $12 a month basically to run it. So it's not going to be as quite as economically effective, what's called, it's not going to be as cheap as a shared hosting account. And that's just kind of the nature of it, but we are trying to get it to be in the realm of pretty affordable. So that's kind of how it lives in the reclaim ecosystem. But what I kind of wanted to talk about, spend probably the most time talking about it is sort of what's good for, why you may want to even think about it for certain use cases, newsletters being a big one. Like I said, we just did a whole course, flex course on newsletters with it. And yeah, even some of the, some of the things around the company, I think are kind of interesting, like it's a pretty small company. And they have a kind of awesome introduction page. You're ever curious that goes through sort of how they, you know, basics about what ghost is, but also how it got started. Like ghost was started as a Kickstarter that they basically said, we want to make this tool. And then when we're done with it, we'll release it into open source so anyone can run it. In fact, the Kickstarter page is still up, which I think is interesting. And so it's got a, you know, kind of humble beginning. I guess, you know, so did WordPress too. But I think very interesting as I think at the start of very reactionary kind of like, hey, there aren't tools that are simple in this way. We have an idea of this elegant publishing tool that we want to exist. So that's how they did it. So I would kind of find that very interesting. But yeah, I kind of wanted to chat about sort of like what it's good for, you know, we use it to reclaim what we like about it. I kind of want to field questions from folks about using it or why you'd want to use it. And I also want to make sure I don't literally talk through this entire community chat. So I'm going to kind of take a pause for a second so that I can go through and just see like, I don't know, did folks have experience using it, questions, doubts at this point about what ghost is and what it's good for? While there's a vacuum, I'll fill it. One of the things that I think is interesting because Pilot and I just finished up part of the ghost course. And one of the things that I found that is an applicable, not only to ghost, which we use in a very focused way and we talked about small tools that do a job well like a newsletter and an elegant thing with ghost. But the other thing is with ghost, you have to figure out transactional email, which is a thing for many applications now that don't run in cPanel. Mastodon being a more recent popular example of running a server discourse, which is the forum application. And ghost was the first time in 2014, I think when I started running it with Tim, I came up against that. And that for me as a technologist was a learning curve. I was like, oh wait, there's a whole new way of running email. And I think that's one of the things, at least on the technical side with ghost as it was interesting is it kind of gave me an insight into how this application was running differently, not to mention no search, no comments. Like a lot of stuff came post facto, but it was a very kind of stripped down simple tool, which is the opposite direction, I think of a tool like WordPress that had been so good at doing so many things because of its community. So it's an interesting tale of two tools in some ways. Yeah, I see it's, so I forgot. I had set up like it's timely for two reasons. The other big reason for me, not just because people are talking a lot about WordPress full site editing and set aside where that is at because we've talked about that a lot in community chats and I think my kind of stance is like, it's interesting but needs a lot of work. Wherever you think about that, it does definitely show like, this is a direction that WordPress as an organization community, open source community is going, right? And I think, so that's one thing, but I think the other thing is ghost has sort of in like the last year kind of added a lot of pieces of functionality, search being one of them, but now there is search built into ghost. There was no search before. The only way to do it was to use like link in external tools and from what I've read and experimented with, the search is pretty good. Like it's not just a basic, it'll look for titles of things. It's a full text search and like a decent built-in option. And then the other one is commenting, which I think is actually huge because before then you had to use a link in an external service like discuss or there's cactus comments as one and those weren't hard to set up necessarily, but it is rough in that most of those are either something you have to separately host, like in its own say reclaimed cloud environment or a different virtual machine or you have to pay for or use a free service. Like so I use discuss comments on my blog and it's something long-term I want to get rid of because they're an ad tracking company. Like that's how they make money and I don't want that to be part of my blog. So having that built in a ghost I think is huge, probably even bigger than search for me personally. So and it's not terribly flexible like the way commenting works in ghost is you can turn it on and people have to submit their email address and they get a confirmation link back to them. That's just how it works. And I don't know that there's a lot of I don't know that there's a lot of configurability beyond that. You can't say you can't make it so that people don't have to submit their email. Like it's just how it is because I think they're not really they don't have like anti-spam built in like a kismet. They don't really have that functionality built in. So there could be reasons why you'd still want to use a third-party service. But I think having that there right from the start is a huge deal. Yeah, we should look into adding the search button. I think it's there on the roundup. Ed, you said it'd be great when roundup has search. I think we really just need a link to it. But I have to double check. We may also need to upgrade that instance too. Yeah. One of the other things about the roundup specifically is that the theme that we've picked is really nice and clean. But by default, it hides a couple of features. And I would not be surprised if a search is one of them or if commenting is one of them. And so that's something that we would have to, as Taylor is saying, go in and link to. Yeah. One of the things with it is themes and ghosts are somewhat simple. And they don't have... They aren't as tied to the functionality of a site as they are in WordPress. Because it's not really like code that ghost is running in the way a WordPress theme is PHP code that is happening to display your site. Ghost is kind of just merging in to what are essentially HTML files, the content. So you can use like a really old ghost theme on a really new version of ghost in certain instances and not really have any issues. But we may actually just need to go update our theme right in the theme browser. One of the things that's kind of rough about our roundup instances, it kind of predates our ghost installer that I spent a lot of time. So a lot of the easy update stuff is not there. So we are subject to the command line for our stuff. But mostly I just... I mean, it's not actually that difficult to do the updates even manually, but it's got to take time to do it. But yeah, it's... We should get that set up. That would be really good. It would be interesting to see if people actually comment once we get comments. I mean, search makes a lot of sense, I agree. But like if and when we put comments in it, like I think in general, the web has moved away from commenting on blogs and that kind of space more generally. If that were to be kind of a thing again, I would obviously think that would be awesome. But it'll be interesting just over time to see. Because there's so much in a newsletter, at least the reclaim roundup, that commenting would seem almost like, what are you commenting on? Almost be more like you would have to do a kind of what would you call it, an annotation. Yeah. Well, I was going to say, it might be interesting for us. We have more than one place. People can communicate with us. It may be interesting to instead of using ghost comments, that we instead link to a special forum post and say, hey, we can discuss the newsletter over here or something like that. There's a lot of ways to handle that because we already have a forum. Or we could say, here's a special Discord channel. There's a lot of different ways to do that, I think. Obviously, we could also enable comments and ghost and maybe even do both if we wanted to. But that is a good point. I actually really like that. That'd be really interesting. It's like, let's use hypothesis for commenting. Just everyone here, click this and it'll open that. It would be something. But it would be kind of cool to have like some kind of self-hosted commenting system that worked like that. But that's another, that's a whole other thing. But yeah, I do think one of the, one of my favorite things about the roundup is, and this is like a small, tiny thing that just ghost does really well, is it is sort of very unfussy once you have ghosts happen. We have ghosts installed. Pilot does a lot of work to make the roundup happen. And Jim, you do some of that as well a little bit. But overall, ghost kind of just is fast and does its thing in the background and we don't really think a lot about it, which is kind of great because we have plenty of other WordPress sites and other sites and servers and things to keep going. And it's not like our newsletter is enormous or anything, but it does get sent out to a decent amount of people and it does get a decent amount of traffic and ghost kind of just stays fast the whole time. And so that's kind of cool. We don't really have to do, I haven't really even considered that throughout the process. I think for me, it's very interesting discussion and I have to go back and watch the ghost session so I'm looking forward to that. I mean, the use case of an email newsletter is one where we really think we want to implement here at our place and because it seems that that's how we could probably best reach our faculty. And I know there are other offices on campus and development and careers and whatever who use newsletters, but I think they're probably just templates and outlook or something like that. But I'm interested in ghost, particularly for this as a possibility. Of course, given our circumstances, we'd have to, it has to be approved, it'd have to go through the software approval process and all that. But yeah, Ed says they use Emma. I don't know that we have a campus-wide platform as such. I'd be curious to kind of broaden it too to see what other schools, not just the platform for the newsletter, but the practice, what's the content? How is it part of your larger strategy? And I really appreciate when schools like Middlebury put theirs out and you can subscribe. So I think they call it the Dirt. And I'm not sure what platform it's on. And Derek Brough, who used to be at Vanderbilt and now he's on personal kind of newsletter, I think it's on something called ConvertKit. But yeah, I mean, we would like to start putting out something like that. And so if Ghost is an attractive option, I'm definitely interested in it, at least for that use case. One of the things I think is not every platform does this very well. And it's one of the reasons I like Ghost, but also on the proprietary side, Substack is one that does do this too, is I personally feel it's important to have a newsletter that arrives in people's inboxes, of course, but also lives as a URL that you can point to. Because I think at least for us at Reclaim, it happens a lot, but I've seen it in other avenues and places too, where it can be really handy to be like, yeah, we talked about that and just send a link and say a tweet or whatever. Or even just to tell people, you can go to the roundup.reclaimhosting.com and go there because some people don't... I do not sign up for newsletters personally. I sign up for the Reclaim one. It's a little different for me, obviously, but I don't sign up for newsletters because I am on a mission at any time to absolutely eliminate the amount of email that is automatic, that isn't stuff from people that I need to respond to. So I do newsletters in an RSS reader. I go to whatever newsletter and usually if they have a website, you can also just do it in an RSS reader. That works for me. So I personally think have that open web component is really important, but not every single tool allows for that. So even like, say MailChimp, which we use for different types of things, not really newsletters, does have the ability to give a link to the email as well, which is kind of nice. Yeah, I linked to the Duke's newsletter, which is one of the ones that comes into my mailbox, in that I was like, oh, that's a good overview of their stuff and gave me some early ideas for Reclaim Roundup. But to your point, Taylor, there's no place you can link to just see their newsletter. You have to get it delivered to your email. I would love it if it was just like a link to a site too, so that if someone linked it to me, I could see it. But Mo, thanks for that dirt on the dirt. That's new to me, and I will subscribe. Yeah, and so it's interesting. So it looks like they do use Emma looking at the URL. Yeah, it looks like that too. I don't know if Tom Woodward's involved in that, maybe not, since it's, you know, probably got all kind of other things on this plate there. But it's, yeah, I mean, I appreciate getting it and seeing what they're doing and how they're kind of reaching out to their faculty in that way and their other users. Yeah, so, you know, and I haven't used Emma. I have used kind of a couple other, a couple other platforms, and I'm like familiar with Substack, but I will say that one of the reasons why we've been so jazzed about Ghost is that it makes a lot of these kinds of things. I'm like, okay, well, we want to collect them in a blog. It's like, well, you're writing a blog. So that's done. That is effectively done for you. And then the other part, which is the email integration part, where do I go? Mailgun is a proprietary service. You're not hosting your own email, but one of the things we talk a lot about in the course, or at least comes up a lot, is hosting your own email is, even in C panel, problematic in a lot of ways, especially if you're going to do a large volume of email, right? So if you're going to be sending a lot, and it's very, very normal and common as probably some domain of its own admins have noticed too. If you're, if a single IP address that say isn't already on Google or Microsoft's radar, sends out a bunch of email that goes through the service, you're just going to get blocked immediately and then you have to appeal and get the IP removed. So we have some recommendations and restrictions to avoid that, but at a certain point that is the nature of it. And it's like, yeah, if you want to send out 600 emails at once for a newsletter, you're going to probably have a hard time with that if it's on shared hosting or a single server of any kind, right? So that's where Mailgun kind of helps, is that your Mailgun is a known entity by these email services like Microsoft Outlook and Google Workspace and stuff. And so you can leverage that tool to simply do the email part and then Mailgun makes that pretty low cost. So it's free under a thousand emails per month, which is I think going to cover a lot, a lot of use cases. And then above that, the cost is still pretty low. You can either do like a pay as you go or get like larger blocks. There's all kinds of different options, but then ultimately it's kind of done. Like you basically sign up for an account, you put a credential in the ghost and it just happens and works. So that I really like that kind of setup because you get to kind of own the infrastructure of the site using ghost and you get to not own the email part of it, which can be very tricky if you're doing large volume email slash next to impossible honestly, depending on the size. So I really like that setup and you could do newsletters in WordPress, right? Like you could use plugins in WordPress to do the newsletter stuff and Mailgun has an integration for WordPress. You could make that work. Most of the newsletter plugins aren't completely free in the way you'd want and it would be a little bit of setup, but that would be possible. But looking at the costs of some of the paid plugins and stuff, I actually think that ghosts with the Mailgun integration ends up being cheaper in most cases. So it's been cheaper and pretty easy to actually manage long term. Yeah, and I'd be interested too on that point, Mo, and Larry and Ed, whether you have already some transactional email services your school are using. I know UVA for Domain of One's Own because that sends some email. They wanted us to integrate with their Mailgun settings so that we could send them cleanly and that would be interesting too because that would be, you could even pick, get clarified, like, hey, I'm going to use the newsletter. Let's just call it GrinnellNewsletter.com and then you could send the email from that domain and it won't look spammed. You could just say, you know, to the IT folks, clear this one, make sure it doesn't go into Barracuda. I know you have to get permissions, but with Mailgun, you can put it in any domain. It doesn't have to be Grinnell.edu or Stanford.edu and that could work too. It can be a little tricky though, the email setup at a school, right? Because Barracuda is for hosted. Well, it's not just for that anymore, but there are often the, how do things end up in spam or not delivered at all in some cases with the age of where email is at right now is we're talking about many, many layers, right? Like, from send to in someone's inbox at, say, an institution. So they can whitelist. And a lot of cases that may help, but you may actually be signing up whoever's managing an email for a little bit more troubleshooting than that to actually make sure that it doesn't end up on a block list. Because if you end up on Google's block list, which isn't that hard to do, it's a much, maybe Microsoft might be, it seems like we have that with Office 365 more often, but yeah. Yeah, to your point, Moe, so transactional email is basically like when you would have on a server an SMTP function like C-Panel does, where it sends the email from the server, which I think is to Taylor's point, like, you know, when you set up a WordPress on C-Panel, it manages all the email for those simple transactional emails like reset password, welcome email. A lot of these next generation applications don't integrate that into the server stack. So you have to do those emails on another service, and you have to point those SMTP settings, which would be local usually for a server, so you wouldn't have to do anything, now get pointed externally. And that's where a service like MailGun, it's kind of different from MailChimp in that it's not like, here's your newsletter from start to finish. It's just like, here's your SMTP email settings, put them in your application and go. So it's a little bit different in that it's just focusing on the mail exchange and the fact of mail getting blacklisted it, absolutely. A lot of times you'll find that if the email from and your two are matching and you kind of figure out with someone like you send it through MailGun and it's fairly consistent in that and you talk to folks and say, you know what, make sure this gets through, you may have some luck with that. So I think mail, whatever you do and however you do it and get permission, newsletters I think are a pretty good way whether online or connecting through email like you said, Mo, to get in faculties, mailbox and for them to know what you're working on. I think that's super, that in and of itself is a really good strategic approach, whatever tool you use to get there. We like Ghost because we host it and we kind of know it and it's open source but there's a lot of ways at it. Totally. I do kind of want to mention too like why email is different in some of these applications you mentioned that like in some of these next-gen applications they don't have that built in and that's because most of them were created with the idea of them being hosted in a sort of more, I'll call it modular way but that's maybe not completely accurate but WordPress and a lot of the tools in shared hosting in Domain of One's Own are very much thought of from the creation of them as you're going to be running this on a shared hosting in-sea panel kind of environment and that doesn't just mean that you have a web server available it means you've got probably a host of other things happening right on that server, right? Something like Ghost was created right from the get-go of like you're going to go to a digital ocean or to a reclaim cloud or to an AWS and make a little tiny server to run this one thing and therefore you're not going to have email on the same thing, probably. So there are a lot of ways around that like just been talking about MailGun a lot but I kind of wanted to mention too recently this came up with someone who wanted to run Ghost on a reclaim cloud but not for newsletters I just wanted to run it for a blog and they're asking about how do I set up email not for newsletters, I do not want to use MailGun and you can also kind of mix and match like in that one I mentioned that you can totally make a Mail account in a C-Panel account if you already have one and use that as your SMTP credentials or if you're working in an institution you could probably work with IT to run your email through their SMTP this is something I did a lot at SNC was we would actually run certain things through the like institution had a separate SMTP server that was set up properly so you don't have to use necessarily a service like MailGun for all of this in fact a lot of it you can do with a combination of C-Panel like I have in that forum post but or you know you could I guess theoretically set up a mail server yourself and do that but then you get into a lot of the issues of maintaining it and stuff like that Are there safe and secure ways to use SMTP from WordPress? Yeah so there are plugins that are as far as I'm aware safe and secure My story about this wasn't like the Panama Papers started with WordPress SMTP because to make the plugin work you had to have your password in the WordPress config file for your SMTP server you have to have username and password and so this law firm that was doing shady stuff had exposed that password that later gave them access to the email server which like caused the downfall of like several world government leaders Yeah so I mean you could set up SMTP that way right but where you put those credentials is different in some cases and Larry's mentioning it here too there's also sort of further back ways in the stack to do it too like we have worked with folks to have like not just an individual WordPress install use SMTP but then also where plugins store that is going to be differently and then finally there are a lot of things you can do even if you were putting literal bare credentials in a WP config file so like by default now we have our WP config files are pretty locked down to only certain user accounts being able to even read them not just write so there's that too so it's kind of I guess my point isn't going to be like a satisfying answer but it's sort of like yes it depends but yeah that is something we actively recommend to folks in certain situations is you may want to consider using an SMTP setup for this and it begs the question like Larry your points are good there Stanford has a certain amount of services set up so Moe it might make sense to just be like you know which one of the ones do you use to send out mail to X amount of people and you know get that subdomain wherever you send it to or however they set it up and say okay those are the SMTP credentials I'll need for this account to send it out and that might be something you know they're willing to do never easy but definitely valuable to get it and if that's what you want to do because I think your your inclination to send out emails to folks on the regular to announce what you're doing is really good usage of something like those what we're doing with the newsletter and the roundup it's been awesome yeah and this thanks for linking that Ed this is interesting my not having read this yet right just kind of thinking about what you described there are like a lot of failures probably of the security of that because you also want to think of like okay the credentials that are in this file if they were found somehow by whatever method what do they get access to right so are they getting access to send from an address and then we shut it down or do they have access to some privileged user on our SMTP do are the database credentials that you know like there's a lot of different things in there this is why you and read that article find it interesting yeah I'm going to later you know they say like okay even if you did use SMTP they should have created an account that the only rights that they had were sending email and couldn't receive mail and couldn't use any of the other services on that email server if they had limited the rights of that account then you know they would have still been fine but they didn't and so this other thing went wrong and it just goes along the cascade you know and it also points to like this firm was targeted because people knew that they were doing shady stuff like people worked really hard to get this you know going yeah yeah so yeah that that is that isn't sure I'll have to read that I do like revolution slider cause the resignation of Iceland's friend did they have that in their plug-in in like in the ratings in the store it's also worth noting right like in terms of we work at a hosting company and we talked about it piloted a little bit during the third session like running email or your own email is hard for all the reasons Taylor set like getting blacklisted trying to do this that and the other thing like if you could find an easy way to offload some of that it's good because it is a powerful tool to communicate but you know running your own email server probably is going to be far more overhead than you ever wanted to run a newsletter but having all the resources that a school has because they communicate via email already it's just figuring to get into that crevice where they do so that you can use a tool like goes to whatever so yeah it's it's interesting because email you would think it's been around but we were joking it's still the killer app in a lot of ways because for many of us in our day-to-day that's where we go to work through our to-do lists or find out what we've been notified so it is a good place to kind of promote what we're doing yeah and also because domain of one's own is shared hosting that does have email options by default a lot of most schools I think turn it off for the reasons that we're talking about but I mean I wouldn't recommend having your users run email through cPanel for one for all the reasons we're talking about and two because it's likely that there are other options that does exist yeah and even that is it a complicated thing to navigate to in terms of like what are the risks of those tools being there like I kind of depends on like what is the project URL for your thing like if you're on a sub-domain under your .edu you might think differently about what those email addresses look like and all that stuff then someone who's got a totally different URL may be harder to mix up with official looking college email and stuff like that also even like how things get through spam like yeah there's a lot of considerations there I always kind of like leaving those tools enabled because I like the idea that folks can play with them and do things like we were saying like oh I want to have a ghost blog or some other thing and I'm going to use cPanel to you know do the email part and I can just kind of click and make an account and that's relatively simple to manage but you don't definitely want to get too close to because like ultimately anyone can go make a mail account on any domain name that isn't one that you control anyway so you're always running that risk of like we want people to be able to play in this space without opening anyone up to risk that is unreasonable so well one thing I want to do if we have time but if anyone has more questions please interrupt me is I just kind of wanted to demo really quick the ghost install thing in Reclaim Cloud just to kind of show that partially because I spent a lot of time on it so I'm sort of proud of it but also I think it's kind of cool to see that it is pretty easy to get started if you haven't seen anything like it before let me share my screen here so let me so if you are logged into Reclaim.cloud you just go to the Marketplace and then under content management there's ghost and so you can set an environment name which will define what your Reclaim Cloud URL is so this is the URL you can visit ghost at if you don't map a domain to it or before you map a domain to it so I'll just make this one we'll call it Taylor ghost leave it in the Canada region and I'll leave the name there and hit install and it will take a little bit it takes like a good 3-4 minutes to install because it's creating a server it's updating making sure packages are configured on the server updating things properly then it's actually pulling the doctor images for ghost because we run this via docker to kind of make a lot of this really easy to manage long term I make this joke every single time I do a Reclaim Cloud demo I'm going to continue I've got a cooking show situation going on here while that bakes in the oven I've got this one already done and we can take a look at it so this is one I made I don't know I think like a week ago or so but when it's all set and installed it will automatically have an IP address attached because most people I think actually wanting to run ghost are going to want to map a domain and to map a domain you will need that IP address and the kind of cool thing about this is in the add-ons menu if I hover over this here here's all the stuff you have to manage ghost itself and it's really all you should need there's a button that will pull updates for ghost you can just hit update it's going to ask you if you want to update and if I click yes it'll update and then it will restart ghost to make sure it's running the latest versions of updates there's a button here to set up mail settings and so if I hit configure in here there's nothing in here but this is where you could set up SMTP or mail gun and I do have that documented in our course too we go over setting up mail gun in particular but basically you just would put in your credential whatever you want here so let's say I wanted to send mail from you know tailor at ghost.jd.me let's say that's where I have it you would then put in your username and password for mail gun one password is being annoying right now if I was using mail gun the smtp.mailgun.org I'd put the port and that mail gun gives me and then the service and transport are whoops are SMTP and I basically I'll click apply and it's just going to set those settings and again restart ghost so it's using them and then the last one is domain configuration here and this one lets you change the domain address the domain name that ghost is going to load on so you do have to point an A record in your DNS to do this so I would need that IP address I would go to my C panel and let me do that really quick so I would go in my DNS zone editor and then I could add an A record so let's say I wanted ghost demo and and I would paste that IP address from Reclaim Cloud in there so that's again that's over over here it's just yeah I did copy the right one and I'll add an A record now that particular one I believe I already used so I'm going to not actually hit the button on this and doing that but just because I use that for some of stuff with our ghost course but that's basically what it would entail and then over here I would put in whatever domain name I set up so ghostdemo.jdn.me and I'd hit apply and that's kind of it it's pretty quick and easy to do it handles HTTPS automatically with that setup in fact there there is no way not to do it our installer is assuming you want to run it on HTTPS because frankly in 2022 you really you can't really run a website not an HTTPS especially not a new one so yeah that's kind of how you manage that over here is now my new install I just did so let's check out what that one's doing potentially security issue oh you know what I did a I have a problem here in that I made tailor-ghost.ca.reclincloud already once today so it's got a conflicting security SSL search so here I will demo in this case setting up an actual domain name for this so let me grab that IP address I'll go into my zone editor do um community chat ghost.jdn.me I definitely haven't used before and I'll go over here and it'll take a little bit and when I click on this it probably when I try to visit the URL I just said it probably won't work right away because it does need a little bit of time to actually restart and issue the cert and everything does take it like a good 30 seconds to get all started up and everything but then we're golden there we go so yeah so that is the DNS bits the one thing like a lot of people are that can be tricky but hopefully looking at our documentation it should make it pretty clear but really just have to take the IP address put it in give it an a record and then you tell ghost what domain it should be loading at and then you're all set so yeah hopefully that makes it easy for folks to try and log into it see what you think of ghost I'm really curious I'd love to see people trying ghost out and kind of I don't know I know I just said I don't like putting two tools up next to each other but I'm always interested when you think about the use cases and actually look at the interface and stuff to see what people think because I'm of two minds always when I'm using this ghost I'm always like I love how simple this is then eventually run into something that WordPress has built in or has a plug in for and I go okay so that ghost doesn't do and it's not really a downside it's just knowing what the tools designed for and what its limits are but yeah definitely chat about that in the form or discord or something I'd be curious to see what people think if they can try it out got like a minute left so I think we're going to wrap up here in a second but I know probably stop the recording in a second but if anyone has other questions or things they want to talk about feel free to hang out for a few minutes so thanks everybody