🏕️ my adventures in #selfhosting - day 165 (VFX edition) 🎞️
Good morning Fedi friends!
I've been quiet on here (it's a temporary pause, I promise) as I have been spending every second of free time - that doesn't include childcare - editing the fediverse promo video.
The video will premiere next week at a really exciting event, right after a presentation by an absolute legend. I'm experiencing low key anxiety / palpitations, rushing to get the film ready for that.
On the to do list: sound mix, fixing some VFX animations, adding a couple of slides to the end credits, color grading, doing subtitles, exporting the video and uploading it to my PeerTube. Gaaaaah!
On the self-hosting side, I have to admit it's incredibly empowering to know I can put it on my PeerTube. Super grateful to #YunoHost for that.
If you're curious, I've published some updates re: what I've been up to this month... including a video replay of my presentation for YunoHost at #JDLL: https://news.elenarossini.com/what-im-up-to-may-2025-edition/
As a geeky side note, I had to edit a link in the article... and it would not update on my site. Awww the wonders of #Varnish cache. It's really THAT powerful. So even though I don't have time to do proper self-hosting tasks these days, I still went into my VPS and used command lines to clear Varnish cache. It counts for something, right?
Wishing everyone a wonderful weekend!
#MySoCalledSudoLife
This #GoToSocial account has become a step-by-step tutorial in how to self-host the publishing platform #Ghost (and troubleshoot issues) 😆
If you're not interested in my messages on the subject, I will be using a new hashtag #EleSelfHostsGhost so you can just mute it.
I'm a little late to the party because everything is now set-up and running smoothly:
✅ I manually installed Ghost on my Ubuntu VPS
✅ I imported all the old posts and media: https://news.elenarossini.com
✅ I installed #Apache to use #Varnish cache and changed the cache's maxAge so that a bit of traffic wouldn't overwhelm my VPS
✅ I published and shared on Mastodon a new blog post: https://news.elenarossini.com/what-im-up-to-march-april-2025-edition/ Thanks to Varnish and the maxAge cache tweak, the VPS withstood the "Mastodon stampede" (the post had made it to Explore!)
So far so good.
👹 but when I tried to send that blog post as a newsletter to just 210 people, #Mailgun immediately flagged me as a spammer and froze my account 😱
It took about 48 hours of back-and-forth emails with the Mailgun team to convince them I'm not a spammer and to get my account reinstated.
Now, why am I sharing all this?
In case you are also tempted to self-host Ghost, I found that the official Ghost - Mailgun documentation has little information available. But I discovered this super helpful post in the Ghost Forums and I will be trying this tweak to see if it makes a difference:
https://forum.ghost.org/t/unable-to-send-newsletter-with-correct-mailgun-api-keys/34186/6
And yes, I'm aware that if you sign up for my newsletter you will get an email with a warning "this message failed the domain authentication" (or something along these lines). Problem is, when I implemented a tweak, changing config settings, the alert went away but I saw a spike in activity in my Dashboard, as if I had sent 600 emails (I did not). For now I can live with the warning.
I appreciate Ghost's new implementation of a spam filter because around the same time I got really suspicious signups originating from the same domain.
Anyway after I change all this I will try to send once again my blog post as a newsletter.
Special thanks to my parents for looking after my little one so I can do all this while she's on a school vacation ❤️