Sitewide socials, theme editing, switching platforms again, and more

ICYMI: new Ghost features

Sitewide socials and {{social_accounts}}

Ghost finally added sitewide socials to go along with author socials! This comes with management in Ghost settings (finally!) and a new helper for generating social links, much better than the old one. The same socials are supported as for authors, so that's: Mastodon, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, X, Bluesky, LinkedIn.

You'll immediately see the admin panel on your Ghost site (assuming your Ghost host has updated you). But it won't actually do anything without theme changes, which are not auto-magic.

Theme devs: You should obviously update. This is awesome stuff, and I for one am looking forward to reclaiming the custom variables and other hacks that we've all be using to allow sitewide socials without actual Ghost support for them.

Users: Should you update your theme? If you already have the socials you want on your site, using whatever hack your theme dev used, there's no rush to do anything with this. Most publishers' sitewide socials don't change often, so you could wait until you need changes (and even then, it'd probably be faster to use whatever method is already baked into your theme than to switch to the new system). If you have an uncustomized theme (no code edits made except in code injection), check for a new version of the theme and pick it up if you like.

If you have a customized theme (i.e. you or someone like me made changes to it), it's going to require code changes. I'm happy to be hired to do these, which will probably take ~30 minutes, but again, if your theme is working well, this is not an emergency, so feel free to wait until you want other work and tack this request onto it.

Share button

Ghost also recently added a built-in sharing button. The theme shows a button/link, and then Portal handles the popover bit and which sharing options are shown. So, while I can change where the sharing link appears, I can't change anything about how the popover looks or the options offered. (Portal is not part of the theme and is not easy to customize, except with some ugly hacks.)

Should you update your theme? See what I wrote above for social accounts. If you want it, sure! If you don't, or you like your current theme-based sharing solution (which can be far more customizable), then it isn't something you need to do.

In addition to possibly adding a button via theme changes, you can also trigger the sharing popup by linking to #/share wherever you like. So, for example, here's a call to action card...

Theme editing in the browser

Second up among the recent changes is built-in theme editing. If you've wanted to tweak a couple words somewhere in your theme, this is pretty cool! There are a couple things you should know:

1. It makes a copy of your theme when you make edits.  That's good, it means if you screw something up, you can go back to what you had before.  (So your edited theme will be called headline-edited, not headline. I'm not sure what it does if you edit an -edited theme. Testing may be required)
2. It doesn't compile your theme assets.  Most themes have a build step for JavaScript and/or CSS.  If you make changes to the raw files but not the built ones, nothing will change. For CSS changes, I recommend using code injection to override styles instead. For JavaScript changes, you might be able to edit the built file (depending on if it's heavily minimized), or you may still want to download the theme so that you can run the build step.
3. If I've done any significant amount theme work for you, I probably set your theme up so that you get a fresh copy of the theme automatically loaded from GitHub when I make changes.  If you switch to an edited version of your theme, any changes you make won't end up on GitHub, and any changes I make won't auto-deploy to your site. If you have me doing ongoing work, it'd be better to make your changes in GitHub (which has a similar graphical editor built in), so that we can keep our work in sync. I'm happy to give you access to your custom theme on GitHub - just let me know your username and I'll send an invite over.

TL;DR:  It's totally OK to edit your theme with the new built-in editor, but you're creating a separate version if you do so. And, for the sake of my sanity, if you decided to create an -edited version of your theme, please let me know when you ask me to change something, because I'll need to start by downloading a fresh copy rather than assuming that the copy I have locally or on GitHub is up to date!

And now, on to the rant...

Why I'm moving platforms... again

I've been using Harvest for the last year for tracking time worked. It was about $10/month, but it saved time on invoicing, my big client liked the detailed report of what I worked on, and it seemed worth it. I also had a mostly-done client portal that used it and Basecamp (where I've been tracking tasks) and Tidycal to pull everything together for clients, that I was going to launch any day now (which is Cathy speak for "drat it, too much client work, not enough time for building my own stuff").

Then I got an email:

Yeah, no. That's ONE seat, and Harvest doesn't actually process payments, just plugs into Stripe. Most of that usage price appeared to be based on the number of clients in the system, making them unaffordable for freelancers with lots of small clients. I'm not paying that. Bye bye annual Harvest plan.

My current plan is to move over to Moxie, which uh... is maybe where I should have been anyway. It's got time tracking and invoicing, and will actually handle prepayments better than Harvest did. It also has project management, which is maybe not quite as polished as what I have with Basecamp, and booking (not quite as polished as Tidycal), and forms, and... yeah. There are a few spots where my assortment of providers might individually do something better, but I'm thinking Moxie is perhaps close enough, and then clients could have everything in one dashboard, and that'd be worth it. I think.

So, dear ongoing clients, I'm sorry if you've had to learn a new platform already this year. I aspire to stay on Moxie for longer. Hopefully much longer.

Spectral Web Services Tools update

And speaking of SaaS, I'm still making progress (although slowly due to being sick) on Spectral Web Services tools. There's tons of good stuff there, although mostly alpha/beta/coming soon right now! And I'm really really trying to build an SaaS that doesn't suck, doesn't randomly jack up prices, and doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Here's a draft of part of the pricing page, partially inspired by too many bad SaaS pricing experiences:

That's all for today, and thanks for reading!

All the cool kids are doing it!

Sign up for our newsletter for Ghost tips, tricks, and musings, once a week.

Subscribe

Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.