Here’s how to launch your own self-hosted business blog
Use Ghost to orchestrate the content strategy for your business
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Ablogusually acts as the central communications platform for virtually all businesses that need to interface with their users.
Everyone from software vendors, to hardware retailers need a content management system (CMS) that’s not just easy to use and administer, but also versatile enough to evolve with their changing requirements.
Ghostis anopen source, headless, Node.js-based CMS that can help businesses of all sizes rollout an effective medium to engage with users.
While Ghost is most popular for blogging, it ships with tons of useful features to deploy all kinds of online publications. It hasSEOandsocial mediafeatures built directly into the core itself, and is flexible enough to be either used individually or with a bunch of collaborators.
Installation
Ghost offers multiple hosting options.
Forself-hosting Ghostthe developers recommend using anUbuntu 20.04 LTSrelease as a base, on a computer with at least 1GB ofRAM, though you’ll get a better experience and mileage with 4GB of RAM.
The process of building the server iswell-documentedand typically involves pulling in supported releases of the MySQL database server, the Nginx web server, and a 14.x series release of Node.js.
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You can also host Ghost with the help of aVPS hosting provider. Ghost officially partners withDigital Ocean, who also offer a pre-madeGhost imageto ease deployment.
The easiest option however is the fully-managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering from the project itself known asGhost(Pro). The service is powered by the exact same open source codebase, and takes care of deploying and managing your Ghost installation, while offering security features and conveniences such asSSL certificates, server updates,backups, and more.
Ghost(Pro) offers multiple pricing plans depending on your requirements, and there’s also a 14-day trial plan that you can use to tinker with the platform.
Initial configuration
Unless you are using the PaaS edition of Ghost you’ll have to spend some time setting up your Ghost installation as per your liking. The process is fairly straightforward since the entire Ghost installation is controlled via a single configuration file.
If you’ve followed the Ghost installation process, you’ll already have a custom configuration file installed by default. The file has severalconfiguration optionsthat you can tweak and customize according to your environment.
Certain parameters in the configuration file are required, such as the ones that specify the public URL of your blog, and the type of database being used, while several others are optional, which you can tweak once you’ve clocked some mileage with Ghost and are familiar with its operation.
One such parameter isstorage adapters, which control the location of the images on your blog. By default, the images are stored in the filesystem, but you can customize the parameter to store them onAmazon S3,Google Drive,GoogleCloud Storage,AzureStorage, GitHub, or on several other locations.
One tool that all Ghost admins must get comfortable with isGhost-CLI. Not only does it help you install Ghost, it’ll also help you update your installation, and assist in regular maintenance tasks.
For instance you can useghost config [key] [value]to add a value to your Ghost configuration file. Similarly, you can useghost updateto check and update your installation to the latest Ghost release.
In case an update breaks your installation, you can revert to the previous working version withghost update –rollback. If you are facing issues with your installation, useghost doctorto troubleshoot and diagnose potential issues.
Note however, that while the project usually puts out a new release every couple of weeks, which you can switch to withghost update, every 12-18 months there’s a major release, which breaks backward compatibility and requires a moreinvolved upgradation process.
Customize your blog
Once you’ve set everything up, it’s time to customize your blog.
By default, the user that you added while setting up Ghost is the owner who has unfettered access to the publishing platform. One of the best things about Ghost is that it enables you to share publishing and administering duties with other users.
Ghost supports five different types ofstaff usersthat have access to the admin area with varying levels of permissions for what they can do.
Besides the default user, who is theOwner, there areAdministratorswho have just about the same level of access as the owner. Then there areEditors, who can invite, manage, and edit the content created byAuthors, as well asContributors, who too can write posts, but don’t have the permission to publish them.
To add staff users, head toDashboard > Staff, which will bring up a list of all current staff members. Click theInvite peoplebutton and enter the email address and select one of the predefined roles to send mail invites to other staff members.
Another interesting feature in Ghost isMembersfeature, which can help you monetize the content via paid subscriptions and email newsletters.
Members can sign up with their email address by clicking theSubscribebutton on your blog. After verifying their account, members can access the content matching their access level.
Ghost supports three different membership levels. There’spubliccontent, which is accessible to all users even if they haven’t registered as members, whilemembers onlycontent is shown only to logged in users.
Thepaid-memberscontent is exclusively for paying members. For this to work though, you’ll have to connect your Ghost publication with Stripe for processing and handling payments. While the process toconnect Stripe with Ghostisn’t cumbersome, it won’t work unless your blog has aSSL certificate.
Start publishing
With everything set up, it’s time to publish your first post.
Ghost has an intuitiveWYSIWYG editorthat offers all the familiar formatting options, along with the ability to easily pull-in all kinds of dynamic content.
To begin authoring a post, head to theDashboardand click the + icon adjacent to thePostssection. Enter a title of the post in the space provided and simply begin writing the body of the post in the provided space.
To format the text you can invoke the contextual toolbar by selecting the text you want to format. The contextual toolbar has the usual text formatting options.
To add dynamic content to your post, press the + icon that appears on every new line. This brings up thedynamic menu, which offers options to insert images, create image galleries, email-only content, embed content from external websites such asYouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Spotify, and more.
Conclusion
Once you’ve got a hang of writing posts, follow the tutorials on the project’s website to familiarize yourself with other Ghost features and use them to flesh out your publication.
For instance you canadd a contact form, or use Ghost secondary navigation functionality toadd social network linksto your publication. If you write long-form posts, you can use thereading_timehelper todisplay a reading durationto your posts.
Helpersare tags in Ghost’s templating language that you can use to add useful functionality to your publication.
Before you announce your Ghost publication to the world, make sure you’re using an SSL certificate, and have secured MySQL (runningmysql_secure_installationshould do the trick).
Also remember to lock down your server by properly configuring the firewall to block all services except ssh, nginx, http, and https. If you’re expecting a lot of traffic, Ghost developers suggest adding aCDNin front of your Ghost installation.
With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’sTechRadar Pro’sexpert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.
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