Prepping for Ghost v3

I've blogged about moving to Ghost from Wordpress. I've blogged about upgrading to the 2nd iteration of Ghost. Now I'm here to talk about the upcoming upgrade to Ghost 3.0.

The main selling point for this free upgrade is members & subscriptions. So lets take a look at the settings this upgrade offers.

So right out of the gate you can connect to Stripe and start putting posts behind a pay wall. This is very interesting to me, because I never read anything that is paid for. You can find guides, blogs and an infinite amount of content without a paywall.

It appears this feature melds together subscriptions and payments. So you can on-board readers as subscribers and promote them into paying consumers. So lets get this out of the way - I will never charge for this blog. However, giving readers the ability to subscribe to my posts I might do. If I can spread my random thoughts to people's inboxes - then win win.

However, this feature just builds the ecosystem allowing for subscriptions. In my knowledge it doesn't do the emails automatically. It needs to be wired up to some service like Mailchimp using an intermediate API solution like Zapier. This presently is just too much work I'm willing to put in right now. I'm used to older products of just clicking a box, setting some API keys and good to go.

Switching topics from the actual software version of this blog. I enjoy blogging and I'm nearing 2 years of blogging every week without fail. This blog is wired together through some complicated Apache reverse-proxy. This has failed a few times when I was setting up SSL and sometimes other issues on this server leads to this site going offline. I'm thinking I'm going to move my Ghost blog to its own hardware, so it can live alone with a database and NGINX. This might increase the monthly rate out of my pocket, but the money saved in configuration will make it better in the long run.

During this move and upgrade I will bring the blog to Ghost 3.0 and enable subscription support. I'll probably just follow this guide and import my existing content into a new install. I don't have a method yet in place to email subscribers on new content release, but that will be added later on.

Finally, I want to announce the retiring of Google Analytics. I can't in good faith continue to use analytic tracking when I know Google benefits massively from this block of code on nearly every website in existence. Most of my readers probably block trackers/ads anyway, so no need for me to continue to run it. I will instead defer back to Munin and log files for analytics. This will happen during the upgrade to new hardware and Ghost 3.0. I additionally want to remove Disqus for the same reasons, but I just can't find a good alternative at this time - so it will remain for now.

Thanks for being a reader and see you soon for v3.0 iteration!