---
title: Nov 20, 2020
date: 2020-11-20
category: Journal
---

I had a call today with Claire and Nandini of [Check My Ads](https://checkmyads.org) and [Andrea](https://twitter.com/andreareimer).

Check My Ads currently runs the [BRANDED newsletter on Substack](https://branded.substack.com/about) and were interested in [[Ghost]].

Andrea is starting a new business and communicating with a lot of people on a lot of different platforms, and was looking at a newsletter option of [[Substack]] vs [[Ghost]] and generally owning her content.

I demo'd the Ghost editing interface using the [[DeployToHeroku]] version of [Ghost + IPFS that I maintain for Fission](https://github.com/fission-suite/heroku-ipfs-ghost).

I had spoken with [[CanTrust Hosting Coop]], a Canadian hosting coop, and they don't currently support Ghost. Cooperative web hosting, tech support, and open source software development consulting is something that I'm interested in seeing more of, as I wrote in [[Joining Social.Coop]]. I've had a good discussion with the team at CanTrust, some of which I'll look at posting.

TLDR:
* I created the [[Ghost]] and [[Substack]] pages here to collect info on those systems.
* I can recommend and support paying for [Ghost's commercial hosting](https://ghost.org/pricing/) -- they are a non-profit foundation producing open source software.
* If you're going to use Substack, use a custom domain.
* For those for whom even $29/month is too much money, the [1 click deploy](https://github.com/fission-suite/heroku-ipfs-ghost) works to get started for free if you set up a Heroku account. Not really recommended unless you've got a technical person to back you up or are yourself comfortable with Git and Heroku already