I packed two months full of updates into one here. Why? Well, life happened. I was traveling through Europe from the end of April until last week. It was an amazing road trip, which ended up being 6,500km long. The best part: my wife and I met our dear friend Christine – the very first Magic Pages customer, who literally begged me to take her money, back in February 2023. I will write more about our trip on my personal blog.
As many of you have noticed, Magic Pages did not stand still, though. A lot of things happened. And to start off with a bang...
🌐 ActivityPub/Social Web is here
It was the #1 topic of conversations in the Magic Pages live chat over the last few months, since Ghost(Pro) released their public beta. Social web. Many of you wanted to get on it as well.
In the beginning of April, I still said "yes, but not now". Mid-May, well...see for yourself:
Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
As of now, there are 79 active Magic Pages sites on the Social Web. And I gotta admit...it is quite fun!
Personally, I was pretty active on Twitter until early 2023, and missed sharing thoughts that were not fully formed blog posts.
If you want to see some behind-the-scenes of how I am building Magic Pages, activate the beta in your customer portal, and search for @jannis@jannis.io or @hey@magicpages.co.
✉️ Prepayment for emails
As you know, all Magic Pages plans include a generous email allowance for your newsletters. When you go over that, the extra emails are charged at $5.00 per 10,000 extra emails. Amazing, right?
Well, some customers go over their included allowance every single month. So, having to deal with invoices every month is tedious. So – thanks to one particular customer who was very vocal about this (I do appreciate it!) – there are now prepayment options for emails:
Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
You can buy up to 500,000 emails at once. These are then used whenever you go over your included limit and will not expire.
🔒 Web Application Firewall For Everyone
A few weeks ago, Bunny.net, who Magic Pages uses as Content Delivery Network, has introduced a new addition to their product: Bunny.net Shield:
Lorenzo FaletraCEO
It is a classic Web Application Firewall (WAF) that aim to protect sites from all kinds of attacks, be it the exploit of security issues, DDoS attacks, or anything else.
I have tested this on the Magic Pages website for the last few weeks and will roll it out on all customer websites in the next few days. More on this here:
Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
💼 Incorporating Magic Pages
After running Magic Pages for 2.5 years, I am at a point where I am thinking of the future of the business. Right now, I am running it as a sole proprietorship, which has the big advantage that accounting is super easy.
However, it also means that all profit is taxed at my personal income tax rate. That isn't great, as I want to expand the cash reserve in the business, and optimise expenses a bit better.
So...I went to a tax advisor and we made a plan. Magic Pages will be incorporated in the next couple of weeks – most likely as Magic Pages GmbH (GmbH stands for Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung – basically German for a limited liability company).
For you, nothing will change. There is an established legal process in Austria to merge an existing sole proprietorship into a new corporation. The new legal entity will be the legal successor of my sole proprietorship, so the only thing that changes is the legal information on your receipts 🙃
🔮 What's Next?
There is still some work to be done on the Typesense-based search. I haven't forgotten about this, but while I was traveling, a few infrastructure-related issues popped up, which took priority.
Additionally, Ghost dropped the first Alpha for Ghost 6 on Github yesterday. Nothing super new is in there though. Ghost 6 will (most likely) be a release that brings Social Web and a new analytics dashboard into general availability. I am using the alpha to make sure Magic Pages is ready for the update when it comes 😊
As always, I'm just a chat message away if you have questions, feedback, or just want to say hello.
About Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
I'm the founder of Magic Pages, providing managed Ghost hosting that makes it easy to focus on your content instead of technical details.
