The Weekly Review: Vol VII Issue 12
Hey friends,
I intended to get this email out a little earlier, but an 8-day holiday with the family seems to leave me with very little time on a screen. Which is a good thing.
Anyway, we headed south and found summer and enjoyed visiting with our family and some old friends. I hope you have a chance to do the same in the weeks to come!
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A move to Ghost
It's been a while in the making, but I finally finished the move to Ghost this past week. Earlier this year, I started to have a couple of issues with Kirby. And since I was a couple of versions behind, thinking about updating was feeling like a chore.
When we added Ghost to People-First Jobs, I started to consider the idea of using a hosted service again. While using Digital Ocean was a good learning experience, I don't have a lot of time or interest in keeping up on anything remotely related to server maintenance. So Ghost seemed like a good alternative, and one that played really nicely with Ulysses. Throw in their focus on memberships, I liked what they were doing (although I have no desire to make my audience a business).
So here I am six months later. All the content from my old Kirby install has been migrated to my hosted Ghost account.
Clean up
One nice thing about this process was the chance to go through 11 years of writing. It's something I've wanted to do for a while. So I took my time and manually imported each post into Ghost, reviewing the content itself (a lot of it, but not word for word). I found a lot of typos, inconsistent casing and headers, and some elements that were styled on one version of the blog or another but were rarely used.
Ghost is also the first time in a long while (ever?) that I've used tags. Going through each post was a good exercise in reminding myself of the consistent themes in my writing.
Design
This is also the first time since the very first instance of my site (using Wordpress) where I used someone else's theme. I purchased one from the Envato marketplace and made a few adjustments. I like creating my own designs, but that takes more time than I had.
It's nice knowing the code is a little (lot) better than what I would have written 😅
This theme is also a lot like the very first Wordpress site. It's dark, and aligned to a grid. I may play around with an alternate lighter theme at some point, but for now I'm happy with it.
Ghost itself
This is a slick piece of software. Logging into the admin interface is almost nicer than seeing a Ghost site itself.
There's a lot to like about this tool as a CMS. Here's what stood out to me:
- The admin UI is great, but so too is the editor. If you like the Medium aesthetic, then you'd like Ghost as well. Although I do all my writing elsewhere, once it's in Ghost, it's a pleasure to work with
- The settings for a post are nice to work with and give you some good options. Managing dates, the post URL, meta data, excerpts, and marking posts as "featured" are easily accessible
- The support for tags is nice. As I mentioned above, it's not something I've used in the past. But it is nice to add this layer of structure (and it will mirror well with the tags I use in Ulysses or Roam). And there's even the option to use internal tags so you can make groupings of content without sharing them with the public
- I haven't yet decided on how to use the membership options, but it's very well done. Someone running a membership business will benefit from Ghost's set up — it takes all the headache out of managing users and integrates nicely with Stripe
- It includes the option to email posts to members, so it could essentially replace your email marketing tools. However, it still lacks some of the features of a more mature email marketing service (like reporting or more complex list management options)
- Their support team is small, but very fast and friendly in responses. When I've needed help setting something up, they've pointed me in the right direction
- The integration right in Ulysses makes a YUGE difference. Publishing straight from my fave editor with the ability to set tags, a custom URL, and an excerpt are just 👌
Where it's lacking
Of course, like any publishing platform or CMS, there are some things missing from Ghost. Here are a few that I found in making the switch.
- There is no default archives functionality. Out of the box, you have the basic blog set up with a paginated list of all your posts. But if you want a basic list that points to each post without an excerpt or the full post content, you have to build that yourself. Here's a good starting point
- Another strange omission is search. Out of the box, there is no search functionality. The Ghost team has a tutorial to add it, but they're suggestion is using a third party service
- Another part of a good blog (in my mind) is link posts. Ghost doesn't see the value in those and doesn't include any option for it.
Cost
Now, Ghost is priced for serious publications. The lowest plan is $36 per month (USD, so just under $50 CAD) — that's a decent cost for a small blog like mine.
However, I was running close to the same price if I factor in a one time purchase of Kirby, plus monthly costs for Digital Ocean and ServerPilot. Add in the potential option to use it in place of a separate email service and it makes a good investment. And I’ve always considered my website a part of my business and a worthy putting some money into.
Overall
I'm happy with the change. Not only is it nice to not worry about hosting or servers, the process of migrating was a great chance to review all my writing over the years.
Any CMS will require a serious blogger to learn something new and dig into the code & functionality it offers. Ghost is no different. But their focus on running a transparent, open source system that enables authors to easily charge for their writing is something I believe in.
It’s an easy recommendation to make.
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Items of note
I tend to enjoy most of Cal Newport's writing. But this piece on remote work leads me to believe that Cal's out of touch with the current state of remote work. Statements like this:
Bosses’ need to boss was surely a factor in the defeat of remote work.
Even before COVID-19, I would have said that remote work is better in 2020 than ever before. Perhaps he's focused on the fact that it's still only a small percentage of the population that can work remotely. Or perhaps I'm affected by my own bubble as a remote worker of more than 10 years, and surrounded by so many others in the same boat.
Whatever the case, I found myself scratching my head while reading this one.
Smart notes and how to take them
Drew Coffman spent some time making a video about how to take good notes, and tangentially, how Roam has helped:
Having this simple system will free your brain of distraction and worry, allowing it wander fluidly from idea to idea instead of feeling bogged down by the mental weight of remembering everything. Instead of worrying about the experience of note taking, you can instead just get to work.
Big thanks to Drew for adding text to his video!
I very much enjoyed this longer essay from Andy Matuschak on people truly learn. He makes the case that lectures do not work for the transfer of knowledge.
Lectures, as a medium, have no carefully-considered cognitive model at their foundation. Yet if we were aliens observing typical lectures from afar, we might notice the implicit model they appear to share: “the lecturer says words describing an idea; the class hears the words and maybe scribbles in a notebook; then the class understands the idea.” In learning sciences, we call this model “transmissionism.” It’s the notion that knowledge can be directly transmitted from teacher to student, like transcribing text from one page onto another. If only!
And he goes on to describe how books suffer from the same implicit assumption:
Like lectures, books have no carefully-considered cognitive model at their foundation, but the medium does have an implicit model. And like lectures, that model is transmissionism. Sequences of words in sequences of lines in sequences of pages, the form of a book suggests people absorb knowledge by reading sentences. In caricature: “The author describes an idea in words on the page; the reader reads the words; then the reader understands the idea. When the reader reaches the last page, they’ve finished the book.”
This is a longer read, but a good one. In the end, he makes a case for some kind of new form for reading. But along the way, he also makes the case reading in the sense that Adler does.
There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading.
If we are to understand something, we have to put effort into it. Active reading is smart note taking, it involves effort beyond simply reading the words on the page.
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Quote of the week
We would suggest that the reason lies in its own character and content. It fails to make men God-centered in their thoughts and God-fearing in their hearts because this is not primarily what it is trying to do. One way of stating the difference between it and the old gospel is to say that it is too exclusively concerned to be 'helpful' to man - to bring peace, comfort, happiness, satisfaction - and too little concerned to glorify God. The old gospel was 'helpful', too - more so, indeed, than is the new - but (so to speak) incidentally, for its first concern was always to give glory to God. It was always and essentially a proclamation of divine sovereignty in mercy and judgment, a summons to bow down and worship the mighty Lord on whom man depends for all good, both in nature and in grace. Its center of reference was unambiguously God. But in the new gospel the center of reference is man. This is just to say that the old gospel was religious in a way that the new gospel is not. Whereas the chief aim of the old was to teach people to worship God, the concern of the new seems limited to making them feel better. The subject of the old gospel was God and his ways with men; the subject of the new is man and the help God gives him. There is a world of difference. The whole perspective and emphasis of gospel preaching has changed.
– J. I. Packer, in an introduction to a reprint of The Death of Death in the Death of Christ by John Owens (available here). Packer passed away this past week, but his words live on.
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Currently
Watching: we recently watched The Upside with Bryan Cranston and Kevin Hart. It was a heartwarming film based on a true story. There's a decent undertone of sexual focus in this one for Hart's character. But apart from that, its lessons focus on disability, race, classism, and second chances.
Drinking: Icefields, a “Belgian inspired pale ale”. I've enjoyed a lot of the current trends in the pale ale category (lots of fruit, unfiltered brews, and lactose). This is another. A very smooth, crisp, and dry pale ale, this one has a flavour that hits all the right notes.
Reading: Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. This has been on my shelf for far too long, but it's an easy non-fiction read to get through as the author is essentially telling a story. A pretty crazy story.
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It’s hard to know how to open and close the newsletters of late. Things seem to be getting better, but then another protest ends in unmarked officers (let’s be real, soldiers) stuffing people in vans. Or we hear about outbreaks of COVID-19 from here or there. It’s hard to know what to say.
But I’ll just stick with this: I choose to focus on hope. There is no injustice or sickness in Christ’s kingdom. I’ll do my best to remember that day by day.
Peace on you ✌️