We recently launched this blog, with Bastian's WWDC Wish, and some impressive page visits. We, Wesley and I, want full transparency between you, the reader, and us, so here's a small post on some decisions from the beginning.
Why did we choose Ghost as our CMS?
Originally I wanted to make my own CMS, I once before made a simple blogging CMS in Vapor, which I later threw out the window. So I thought I could do it again in a short amount of time, but the task quickly became daunting. But I really wanted to launch the site so I could get Wesley onboard from the get-go. I started without a CMS, and I don't like the admin panel of WordPress, I wanted something self-hosted. I decided on Ghost, as I know one using it, and being happy with it.
I didn't know much I'd love the CMS before installing it, my thought was to slowly replace parts, which I still might, as Ghost is much more modular than initially thought!
As an example of the modular structure; I am currently writing an Apple News publisher for Ghost, so we can easily push to Apple News, while just using a single front end. Ghost's API is exhaustive enough that it's possible to change the admin panel, make a custom front end, and suddenly Ghost is just an interface to a database. According to Ghost's website, big sites like Apple Newsroom is using Ghost, but that's not fully apparent on their site, which show's the extensibility of Ghost, or rather how easy it is to include Ghost in your current project.
Apple News Publisher
The flow of the publisher tool I'm writing will begin it's cycle with a text editor with Markdown support, and uploaded to Ghost, which also supports Markdown. When the article is published, a Webhook will be activated on a different server. The server then asks Ghost for a list of all published articles, parses that and pushes to Apple News.
In the future, I might make a publishing platform. This platform will send to Ghost as well as Apple News, for better control, as Ghost's Webhooks only does basic get requests.
I might not remove Ghost completely, but I could see myself playing with the modules for fun, while keeping the stable parts intact, until my fun becomes stable.
In the future, I'll also plan to make an ActivityPub translation layer, and maybe even release these tools for a source of income, if interest arise.
Monetization
Wesley and I hope to, in the near future, be making a decent penny for this project.
Part of why we want to publish to Apple News, is to get a revenue stream. We're also discussing various other revenue streams, sponsored content, ads, affiliate links and stuff like that.
Analytics
For analytics we use SimpleAnalytics, as they have a lucrative privacy policy, something we highly value. I feel confident in their privacy policy, due to the service not being a free service. I have decided to keep the analytics open for anyone to see for the sake of full transparency.
If you've got any questions, you're welcome to contact Wesley or I on twitter.