Wondering how people are using and interacting with your Ghost blog? Why not use Google Analytics to track behaviour.

CloudFlare offers free certificates to secure traffic between its CDN and your website. Using this allows using Full (String) SSL/TLS.

Software changes fast in the modern world and keeping up-to-date can be difficult. Having left this site on an old version it needs to get attention now.

Disqus is a third party that interacts seamlessly with Ghost to provide this functionality.

This post is about my approach to setting up a test site for my Ghost blog, a copy of the original, on a new, shared test server.

Comments can add colour to post but may overpower it; ads provide potential revenue but can suffocate it; product endorsements can provide value but are sometimes misleading. This post tackles the presence or absence of each of these from this site.

This post acts more like a checklist of steps to complete when setting up a new Ghost Blog from a base Ubuntu installation. It focuses on doing so on a droplet provided by Digital Ocean, but could be adapted to any other provider.

Emails from your new Ghost blog and domain are likely to get stuck in the junk folder of your recipients email account. Solve this problem using Mailgun.

Since I’m hosting my own version of the Ghost software on Digital Ocean, I am responsible for applying all the server and software updates. The Ghost team make regular releases, every few weeks it seems, and it doesn't take long to fall behind.

Be wary of default settings. They can cause confusing behaviour if you don’t fully understand the consequences, debugging can lead to wild goose chases and the solution is sometimes so trivial that the waste of time hurts.

It's fairly straightforward to set up a blog such as this one. I'll go through the steps I took with some details about the decisions I made along the way.