Spectral Web Services
I am going to be the queen of embed-card-workaround things
DataWrapper, Flourish, LinkedIn, custom image layouts, and did I mention it all syndicates to Apple News?
... but clearly I should decide what to call them!
Publishing on Ghost should mean that your content looks great in email, on web, on ActivityPub/social web, AND on Apple News, if you're using my Ghost->Apple News integration.
This is super easy, as long as publisher stick to paragraphs and native images. Do publishers do that? Nah. Flourish embeds, Instagram embeds, Datawrapper embeds, small headshots with text. You name it, they do it.
The good thing about the toolbox having a lot of tools is that I have all the control needed to make everything work together. The bad thing about the toolbox is that... well, yeah, it's hard! Today I worked on that expected interoperability, and while you still can't put anything you want in an html card and have it show up on Apple News, the list of things that do work just got a little longer. Right now, the list stands at:
- Instagram embeds
- Datawrapper embeds
- Flourish embeds
- Spotify embeds
- Bluesky embeds
- PDF embeds (and buttons to flip through them on web)
- Plus some things that aren't really embeds, but got swept up in the "can I make this thing work on all surfaces?" which led to the card on the right.
And also this card, since although a theme can give you a nice little author card, an email doesn't:
 | Cathy Sarisky, Ghost Expert |
And I was thinking about cards, and then while I was reading the New York Times, I noticed that they have a layout for headshots that puts the caption next to the headshot. Here's my rendition:
 | This is the logo on my business card. I'm pretty taken with this Ghost, although I didn't know her name was Boo Radley until Claude decided to create demo content for me. |
