If you've got a forgotten Ghost site with test/dev data, it's time to check in on it

The Ghost Explore re-launch is super cool. I'm excited about anything that improves discoverability.

But at the risk of being the wet blanket in the room, I wanted to take a moment to share some things I learned today:

1) If you have a self-hosted Ghost install with a separate admin domain, it won't automatically appear on Ghost Explore. I'm told there are technical reasons why this cannot easily work. If your admin domain is on the same domain, it should work. My site needed special intervention, and still isn't showing a full set of data compared to sites on Ghost Pro, although maybe that'll change as content syncs. 🤞

2) The Social Web tab right now appears to be limited to sites using the Ghost Pro-hosted ap.ghost.org, not self-hosters using self-hosted Activity Pub. (It also doesn't appear to work for people hosted with other Ghost hosts that provide a separate Activity Pub instance.)

So... Ghost Explore is super cool, and if you're hosted with Ghost Pro, you can take full advantage. If you're self-hosting, and skipped parts of the "server hardening list" (specifically the separate admin domain), then your site can be listed, but if you chose to self-host ActivityPub, then you won't show up in the Social Web tab.

Since the Ghost dev team makes their salaries from Ghost Pro users and since they're the ones hosting Ghost Explore, I don't want to complain too much about everything not always working for other users, but the announcement feels a little disingenuous. You can't use Ghost Explore to find all Ghost sites. It works 100% for Ghost Pro sites, and may work partially or not at all for non-Ghost Pro sites, depending on configuration.

Yeah, I dislike marketing-speak. Sorry. If I'd written the announcement (yeah, no), I'd have announced an awesome new feature for Ghost Pro sites, with some generously provided access for non-Ghost Pro sites if they met the following conditions....

And now we see why I don't write marketing emails, huh? Yeah, ok.

So, the title of this post. Right, let's get on with that. If you've stood up a dev/demo/testing site somewhere public in the last couple years and forgotten about it, now would be a really good time to go check in on it. The Ghost Explore toggle is on by default, so that site sitting on the random subdomain that you've been meaning to decommission at some point? Yeah, it's probably now discoverable in Ghost Explore. I found six dev/demo/testing sites for one organization I work for, with content that was stale/random/broken/wrong etc etc etc. I found a demo site I stood up last week as a courtesy for another client showing up when I searched their site's name in Ghost Explore, because I'd imported their settings and some content, including their logo.

It's a good reminder: If you have a demo/test/staging site is out there in the world:

1) Make it private. [This stops it from accidentally getting indexed by Google.]

2) Turn off the Network toggle while testing (or else it'll send your test posts out to the Fediverse – even if in private mode).

3) If you can't make it private while testing something like social sharing previews or site speed, turn off the Explore toggle to keep it from showing up alongside your real site in the Ghost Explore search results.

4) Decommission it before your company forgets it exists or no longer knows what email has admin access. [Yeah, really.]

To folks in the U.S., I wish you a happy Thanksgiving, delicious tofu with gravy (what, just me?), and time with the people you love.