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🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 106 (email edition) 📫​

Good morning Fedi friends!

I'm DELIGHTED to report that my self-hosted Ghost blog is fully functional and it withstood the "Mastodon stampede" (so far, knock on wood).

TWO challenges remain:

1) fixing mail DNS records (TXT & DMARC) so that people who sign up for my newsletter won't get a warning that the email "failed the domain's authentication requirements" - thank you for the heads-up @KitsuneVixi!

For some strange reason the warning appears for email signups but not newsletter sends. So I will investigate this morning and add some code to the Ghost config file too (in addition to triple-checking DNS records). Thank you @mdileo @shom @luca for the brilliant tips and guidance 🙏​

2) The announcement I shared yesterday on my Mastodon account (5000+ followers) with the link to my new Ghost blog didn't overwhelm the VPS. But! The toot didn't contain a link with a preview card that had to be fetched by hundreds of servers. So, the real test will be publishing a new blog post and seeing how it holds up when it's shared on Mastodon. My heartbeat accelerates just thinking about it 😅​

Advocating for FOSS also means contributing to projects with feedback, etc. (as someone eloquently said to me here a few months ago - sorry if I can't credit you, it's been a while). Anyway, all this to say that I will write to Ghost devs today (and John) to tell them about the buggy code that's on their Configurations page. And to suggest a tweak that may help other self-hosted sites withstand sudden traffic from Mastodon. It worked for me, so I feel like it's important to spread the word, since many people have been struggling with the same issue.

Anyway, a HUGE thanks once again to @ticho @jana @leberschnitzel @jpoesen @scammo @moonshinebrigade @mkj @aarRJaay who helped me debug the code yesterday. Infinitely grateful to you for all your advice and help! I was THIS CLOSE to giving up... and now I'm thrilled to be self-hosting my Ghost blog.

Wishing you all a wonderful day!

UPDATE: I just tweaked the config.production.json file in Terminal adding Mailgun SMTP credentials... and now I don't get the warning anymore WOOHOO! 🥳🥳🥳

And don't worry, I'm not getting too cocky with this. I kept typing "restart ghost" in Terminal and couldn't figure out why I would get an error... so I kept checking the JSON code... till I realized that the right command was "ghost restart" 🤦‍♀️😅

#MySoCalledSudoLife