Week 1 - Initial Blog setup
I'm trying to work out if I need to set up a new blog for Freesia.
This blog also needs some proper branding and url too.
What I've been struggling with is whether to keep this one together with all the technical productivity content I'm planning to create, or split it.
I'm considering keeping them together and using tag or some way to organise them for people who are only interested in one kind of thing. As half of the reason of creating productivity content is to guide me into working out what product to create.
I think later when I'm ready to launch, I could create a separate site with the product landing page, and maybe a FAQ page, and if I really want, just lift and paste any relevant content then.
I also need a place where I can grow my list.
Plus I need to choose a domain.
I also need somewhere that I can see at least some basic metrics, as currently I can't tell if I have any views.
And like - Microblog doesn't even have a spellchecker!!! I have to paste my writing in and out of a google doc in another tab to check and fix the spelling!
I'm thinking of setting up a DigitalOcean or Linode box and installing a few copies of the Ghost blogging platform.
I can also use it for my art blog too as I found a theme that will suit it better.
I'm just hitting a bump of uncertainty because it might take some time to get it all set up, and setting up multiple ghost blogs on one DigitalOcean Droplet looks a little bit challenging.
2020-02-25 10:26 pm
Now I've hit a massive roadblock.
I signed up to DigitalOcean, but I can't think of a domain name to put on my site.
I can think of a good game company one, but I don't know if it's professional enough to be mainstream.
I wimped out of the Freesia name, because Phreeisa. Inc is MASSIVE and on the stock exchange and I don't want them to take issue with my name.
Other animal and plant and fruit/vegetable names on their own are turning up a blank.
2020-02-25 10:29 pm
So, I did what I often do when I get stuck writing some code - I parked it, did what else I could do first, then did the absolute simplest, dumbest, ugliest thing I could do to get what I want at least working:
I purchased a domain name for another blog I had sitting on WordPress that I wanted to transfer over, and I also purchased wanderingteacup.com for this site for the time being.
Then I started trying to set up my digital ocean droplet. It took me quite a few tries, and I recreated the droplet quite a few times because I mucked it up.
But I have the domain name for my old WordPress site working and have just cut and pasted all my old posts into ghost. I can finish setting it up properly later.
I tried to get two ghost instances running on the same droplet, but the guide I was following was outdated, so it didn't end up working. I'm thinking it may be better to keep each blog on its own droplet going forward unfortunately.
I'm still in need of a name for this blog if you have any ideas - Wandering Teacup is supposed to be my travel blog's name!
2020-02-25 10:30 pm
Trying to track what I do at work
Do not DM slackbot! It will search the docs for everything you type. I tried journalling in my own dms. It worked ok, as it didn't take up as much space as I thought.
I was getting very stressed about coming up with a domain name for this blog and it was affecting my energy levels a bit.
2020-02-25 10:46 pm
And now Ghost is installed on my wandering teacup box, but the browsers on my personal computer have somehow cached a redirect I set up ages ago to another website I have. I can't work out how to clear that setting.
2020-02-26 10:02 pm
I worked it out (at least for Firefox) without having to reinstall it. Go to history, then type in the website url, then right click and select 'forget this website'. Tada!
No more permanently cached 301 redirect.
I've signed in with my browser, but I tried the Windows ghost desktop app and unfortunately it's not working.
Just setting up my art blog on a droplet too.
2020-02-26 10:04 pm
The art blog setup hasn't worked yet, I think the domain name servers might not have fully switched it over from where I had before.
I could set it up on wandering teacup tonight then export it tomorrow.
Except that figuring out how to upload a theme takes effort. Like do I clone the whole git repository and then make it into a zip? I'm too tired to google it.
2020-02-26 10:13 pm
Something I discovered today - Ghost doesn't have any analytics installed by default, so I'll have to choose something to get some. Because I really want some analytics. I need to choose the one that I feel gives me both enough information about number of page views and reads and also respects the reader's privacy enough.
I'd like to have at least something set up before I share my new blogs around to know how much people are looking at them.
I also need to think about what I'm going to do about collecting email subscribers. I didn't see anything to manage members in the vanilla Ghost console, but I might have missed it.
2020-02-26 10:16 pm
I can manage people under Staff, but I don't think that's the same thing as the membership feature they were talking about on their blog. It might be a pro-only feature.
Regardless, it might be easier than doubling up on two places that are storing emails.
So I need to choose something to manage an email newsletter.
Or at least some way for people to subscribe somehow. Can I make an RSS feed?
ENABLE MEMBERS IS IN THE LABS SECTION, IT'S A FEATURE TOGGLE
Ah-ha. So now I just need to sign up for Mailgun.
Hmm. Mailgun looks pretty good, seems like I can send mail ... but I need a way to receive email too. Do I need to sign up for a g-suite or something underneath one of my domains?
Ugh, now I really want one better than a placeholder.
At least I have a real email for my art blog, maybe I can set that one up first.
Mailgun looks super cheap! If I'm right, it'll only cost me a dollar each month to send out up to 1000 emails.
That's the sending part, not sure if it comes with a UI or anything. No idea how to set up a nice campaign or something, but that's where the fun is!
I don't see the need for fancy html emails anyway (yet), so plaintext should be fine. I just want to be able to automate a 'welcome flow' when someone signs up for now.
2020-02-26 10:31 pm
I'm exhausted from doing a whole week of work, extra stuff in the evenings, and then not sleeping well on Thursday and Friday night.
I tried again to set up my art blog, but the domain still wouldn't connect. Seems I needed to formally disconnect it from my old site too. I cancelled my premium plan, and disconnected the domain, but then I lost my email address that I paid extra for too. :(
I'm now sitting waiting for the DNS to propagate through on my art blog domain name.
2020-02-29 2:55 pm
Privacy Respecting Analytics
I do not want to use google analytics, and I don't want the analytics to install tracking cookies on the user's browser or anything like that.
Things I do need:
- Total number of page views broken down per day and per post
- Ideally the number of unique visitors estimated as respectfully as possible.
I'm not quite sure how this is calculated and how accurate or invasive the current methods are.
- Referrer.
I'd like to see what place people arrived from, for example twitter, my email newsletter, google search etc.
- User agent.
This could be handy - especially for working what size screens to optimise my site, and what browsers to try to ensure I support. It's not essential.
- Button clicks and funnel optimisation.
Once I launch my product, I will need to see how my sales funnel is working, and which percentages of users clicks through to each step.
I'm not sure what else I need. Location could be interesting, but I'm not sure whether it crosses the line into being a little too invasive. Still, it would be really interesting to see my readers broken up by country.
It might be interesting to write a post that details all the main ways that websites can track you, and what you can do to guard yourself against one of them.
2020-02-29 4:58 pm