ETA: Most of the #Substack tagged posts I can see here are about #SubstackMigration, while most posts with that tag on LinkedIn are from people (still) hosting on that platform. Not surprising
@molly0xfff This is a great writeup! I'm curious if there's a reason you picked Ghost over WordPress? (This is not a trick question, I have no horse in that race.)
@sfrazer434@jwz@molly0xfff I have used WP for about two decades now (oh god) and Ghost for a shade under two years. The constraint of the newsletter form, vs the infinite sprawl of the CMS space that WP-corporate targets, makes Ghost’s editor generally more pleasant to use. I assume that’s the same on the admin side, though these days I’m hosted for both.
@jwz buried in the footnotes: "In fairness, it is possible to self-host WordPress, which is also open-source. It is, however, also written in PHP — a language I am much less comfortable with and enjoy much less than Ghost's JavaScript. WordPress is also quite a bit older, and, in my opinion, somewhat bloated with features I don't and won't need."
@molly0xfff@jwz Molly, didn’t Ghost begin life as a clone of WordPress? I could be misremembering given it’s JavaScript as you point out or they rewrote it as they went along?
Does it produce static HTML or are pages all generated when requested?
@fahrni@molly0xfff@jwz Ghost is (or at least was last time I checked) way more performant than Wordpress. It used to be surprisingly common to see small Wordpress sites “getting Fireballed”, after @gruber linked to them and they received more traffic that they could handle, causing them to crash.
@fahrni (removed the others) - my day job has me working in this space a lot, so I thought I'd chime in.
Quite a few folks use static build processes against backends like Ghost (there are LOTS of headless CMS systems these days). They get the benefits of publishing workflows and super robust CMS tooling, but the static files on a simple server that can handle massive load.
It's a good setup if build times are tolerable. For folks coming from instant publishing like Wordpress... 😬
It could be an outdated version of curl or openssl/LibreSSL. I tested with:
curl 8.4.0 (x86_64-apple-darwin23.0)
libcurl/8.4.0 (SecureTransport)
LibreSSL/3.3.6
zlib/1.2.12
nghttp2/1.55.1
Release-Date: 2023-10-11
@sfrazer434@molly0xfff whatever problem it was appears to be server-side and intermittent as it started working again on all clients (mobile and desktop) a couple hours ago) 🤷🏼♂️
@molly0xfff Ooo it suddenly worked on my browser, but not curl. Diff seems to be the browser is now hitting 104.21.72.231 (works) whereas Curl is still hitting 172.67.155.170 (doesn't)
@molly0xfff "xNext up was email. In order to send bulk emails from Ghost, you need to use Mailgun. Mailgun is actually the priciest part of my setup, at $75/month"
Do what you are using Mailgun but for pennies, via Amazon SES (their bulk email service). I run my newsletter and other things off it; its very straightforward, has a great interface, and ALL the options.
If you want to send out both through Mailgun, you can send the transactional emails out through the Mailgun SMTP interface.
You can send (only) transaction emails out through SES also via SMTP.
The Ghost project is open supporting other providers for bulk email, but first an "adapter" needs to be created that abstracts the details for each provider.
@markstos@molly0xfff So I can't use SES for bulk? That kills my initiative to do a standalone then. No sense paying Mailgun $$$$ for what I can do for pennies.
I've now got a working self-hosted site at https://daily.jimcarroll.com ... managed to get my Substack import working fine. The biggest issue was tuning the server size to accept the import of my file - 897MB.
I'm struggling with the mailgun config though; I'm not familiar with JSON and have tried to run this through a few JSON validators without luck.
@molly0xfff - thanks for your pointer to Ghost - was never really aware of it and I will build out on it now. To build mine - I'm a huge fan of Runcloud.io for server builds - and they had this handy document that made the process all quite straightforward.
@molly0xfff This is wildly funny because I'm literally running the migration at the very moment that your post crossed my feed. If all goes well, I'll be at ghost.jimcarroll.com
I started up on ghost two days ago after reading the Platformer story.
I'm wildly small on Substack, but Ghost looks better anyways.
I'll start out on the platform, but after reading your post, might self-host.
@molly0xfff I am not in the newsletter sending game, I never used Substack, but wow... this is fun to read and provided lots of (geeky) insights moving to Ghost as a publishing platform.
If you want to know about settings up Ghost incl. nitty-bitty details to redirects, payments (via Stripe), Mailgun and a lot more, this one is for you!
@molly0xfff Wow! Thank you for writing that detailed explanation! This is great for anyone moving to Ghost!!
I migrated from Substack over to WordPress back in November… but I don’t have any of the complexity you did! (For example, mine is free so no payment processing or anything.)
@molly0xfff - Read the whole post. Thank you for the detailed ebbs and flows of the migration with sharing so many resources.
I too, am a font nerd. So I was curious about that! I’ve created some Ghost themes for some clients and fonts always give me some issues. If you have any other resources that helped you I would be grateful!
Glad to see you’ve done away with Substack and their blatant disregard to moderate (or lack there of) hate speech. Ghost is great!
@offbrands i didn't have too much trouble with fonts, besides trying to use a variable font and ending up with a very wobbly look on linux. swapped it out with the other version and it resolved the problem
@molly0xfff thanks for sharing! Can I ask what you're doing for footnotes on Ghost? This has been the bane of my Ghostly existence: adding a new footnote requires renumbering, and for the footnote to be linkable it needs to be either an HTML or markdown card (so I can't just cut-and-paste the wysiwyg test).
@thenexusofprivacy it's pretty janky lol. i just write either [#fn-uniqueidimadeup] or [#ref-uniqueidimadeup] in-text depending on whether it's a footnote or a reference, and then i put an accompanying [fn/ref-uniqueidimadeup] at the bottom of the page with the footnote/reference content.
then when i'm about ready to publish, i run a little script to go through and grabs the rich-text, changes it to a HTML card, inserts the footnote, and numbers everything for me.
Add comment