Spectral Web Services
Migration gotchas
Should you move from Substack to Ghost? Yes, totally. But check your data carefully once you do!
I work with a lot of publishers. A lot a lot a lot. Today, I discovered two folks who'd had embedded audio in their Substack posts that didn't make the migration to Ghost – the audio cards were totally gone, post-migration. One of them had also lost some PDFs; the cards were there in Ghost, but the links were broken.
It's a good reminder: Check carefully whenever you migrate platforms!
Fortunately, both Substack accounts still exist, so I'm going to write some automation to get that content over to Ghost, but it's not the kind of thing you want to miss on migration.
Bonus tip: If you're migrating from ANYWHERE, always check that your images are right before you turn off your previous hosting. Right click the image, choose "copy image address", open a new tab, and drop that url into the tab. If the url is your new site, great. If the URL is your old site, be cautious. You might be hot-loading the image from the old site, and when you take the old site offline, the image will no longer load. I've seen that one too many times.
It doesn't matter if you're doing a Concierge migration into Ghost Pro, using the automated tool, have hired me, or are using the built-in import tools within Ghost itself. There's a lot of ways it can go wrong. Always check carefully before you turn your old service off.
Hi! Cathy here. 👋 If your organization could use a fractional developer specializing in Ghost CMS on a recurring basis (10-40h/month), please hit me up! January is full, but I've got some space on my "dance card" for February.
And yes, I'm still totally happy to be booked for an hour or a day, if that's what you need, but the time spent on the pre-sales work necessary to fill the whole calendar in hour and day-long increments gets tedious, the continual context switching is annoying, and I'd rather do more work for fewer folks, if I can find the right folks. 😄 Just putting this out there, in case the universe decides it'd like to manifest a second perfect quarter to half time client for me.
