Better Search and Analytics for Ghost

About this episode

Chris Emunds — the solo developer behind Vellumine, a managed advanced-search and analytics platform for Ghost — joins Jannis to talk about the path from Jekyll and WordPress to Ghost, why he started building on top of the Ghost ecosystem, and the specific gaps in Ghost's native SodoSearch that Vellumine sets out to close.

The second half is a conversation about the reality of bootstrapping software alongside a full-time job — Chris on treating the day job as a superpower rather than a constraint, what real users asked for in his beta, and how much ranking and semantic-search behaviour is really an expectations-management problem. They close on what John O'Nolan has said publicly about investing in the Ghost ecosystem — talk linked below.

Chapters

• 0:00 — Welcome
• 0:22 — Meet Chris — Vellumine, solo dev, day job in PropTech
• 2:13 — Path to Ghost via Jekyll & WordPress
• 3:29 — Realising Ghost is self-hostable
• 4:21 — Start Small, Stay Small — the book that changed his perspective
• 6:42 — Ghost's SodoSearch — what it is and where it stops
• 14:19 — Semantic Search — meaning, not just keywords
• 17:24 — Bootstrapping alongside a full-time day job
• 19:56 — Beta launch and real user feedback
• 24:06 — Search ranking, synonyms, and the UX of expectations
• 44:04 — What John O'Nolan said about investing in the ecosystem
• 47:00 — The Ghost ecosystem — gaps, opportunities, restraint

Links & mentions

• Vellumine — Chris's advanced search & analytics platform for Ghost
• Ghost's SodoSearch — the built-in search widget Chris compares against
• Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling — the book Chris cites as the shift from big-VC-startup thinking to sustainable bootstrapped software
• John O'Nolan on investing in the Ghost ecosystem — the talk Chris references
• Episode 2 — Our Very First Customer
• Episode 1 — What is Magic Pages?

Transcript

Jannis: Hi, and welcome to the Magic Pages podcast, where we sit down with the people building, hosting, and publishing on Ghost. I'm Jannis, and today I'm here with Chris, the solo developer behind the Vellumine. Chris, first of all, did I pronounce it correctly, and can you quickly introduce yourself?

Chris: Yes. Hi, I'm Chris. Vellumine is correct, yeah. I am a software developer of around about 13 years now. I worked for different software companies all throughout business, like CRM customization. Later on, I specialized in AI and went into the computer vision field for some time, worked at a sports company where they needed computer vision. And now I'm working in, I think, what you would call PropTech, so software and AI for civil engineering applications.

But as you pointed out, I also started my own little business called Vellumine, which is a managed platform for advanced search and analytics for Ghost.

Jannis: Very cool. I want to get a little bit into what Vellumine is and what it does a little bit later, but maybe since this is a podcast for the Ghost community and most people listening to this are probably publishing on Ghost themselves. Can you tell us how you came to Ghost? How did you end up figuring out Ghost, working with Ghost, and then also taking the step from I'm using Ghost to, well, I want to build a tool and. I want to build a business on top of Ghost.

Chris: Yeah, so I've always liked the idea of writing, writing blog posts, writing content for the internet. But I never quite enjoyed the experience of actually writing. I struggled a lot because, I don't know, of perfectionism. But a long time ago, I first started building a little blog on top of Jekyll and GitHub Pages, which had the nice benefit that it was free to get started. But the experience in relation to previewing and writing wasn't that great. I also then afterwards tried WordPress for a little bit, but found it to be quite bloated and also not the nicest writing experience.

Eventually, I came across a friend of mine and I found that he was using Ghost as well. So. I actually clicked that little link that said Powered by Ghost and I ended up on the Ghost website. That was a couple of years ago. But I also fell into that common trap of confusing open source Ghost with Ghost Pro, the hosting service. At the time, I saw the price tag and backed off a little bit because I only wanted to start a hobby blog and didn't intend to make any money from it.

So really only last year, by coincidence, I stumbled over Ghost again and took a bit more time to investigate what it's actually about. Because I heard that it was supposed to be open source, so I thought you must be able to self-host it then. It turned out you can. I just didn't see it at the time when I first came across it. So I gave it another look and just spun up a docker container to try playing around with it. And I really liked the experience of using the editor to write content. You could really just focus on your content and you didn't have to tinker so much with settings and configurations. It also felt very slick, not as bloated. So that's how I ended up with Ghost.

Jannis: So you doubled around with Ghost. When did you look into the search? When did you figure out that there is a potential for maybe a little bit of a different search? And when did you decide, okay, this might actually be a good business opportunity for you?

Chris: Yeah, so sometime last year, I also came across a book that kind of changed my perspective on this whole topic. I always was curious about entrepreneurship, starting my own software business. But I also always was under the impression that it had to be this big idea. You found your startup. You go hunt for venture capital. You hire a team and you disrupt some market. So I was always put off by this risk that comes with that. And like I said, last year I came across a book that changed my perspective on this a bit because it was talking about how you can also bootstrap a small micro SAS. And that's actually a much more sustainable alternative to going out and starting a huge thing with venture capital.

Jannis: And you tell us what the book was?

Chris: The book was Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling.

Jannis: I haven't read that myself, but the story itself feels very familiar to me, yes.

Chris: It's a bit on the older side now. I think it was published in 2010. But yeah, some of the parts are still relevant to just how you bootstrap a software business. And like I said, that was around the time that I also found my way back to Ghost. And so those two things just came together. I wanted to start my own software business. And since I still struggled producing my own content, I considered maybe I can take a more supportive role and create tools for publishers that don't struggle quite as much with producing posts to help them succeed and to provide value. And that kind of led me after some investigation into what are those tools?

What do publishers need? How can the Ghost ecosystem maybe be improved a bit in that regard? That led me to finding out that the native search had some gaps that are sometimes an obstacle for serious publishers with a lot of content.

Jannis: Can you tell us a little bit what those obstacles are? Ghost does ship with the native search engine. That's included for a couple of years already. So every single Ghost block that you have out there, unless it's actively disabled, is able to search your content. But what obstacles are there that you found?

Chris: So the Ghost native search widget or application is called SodoSearch, right? And first of all, the major difference between SodoSearch and a search platform like Vellumine is that SodoSearch performs search in the browser on the client side. So basically, it downloads a bunch of posts, authors and tags from your blog and performs this search client side. That comes with some limitations. For example, it is very expensive to do full text search.

So it's not easy to search the full body of your posts. Instead, SodoSearch really just searches the title of your posts and maybe the excerpt. So you can either set a custom excerpt or it just defaults to the first couple hundred words of your post. But if the words that your readers are searching for do not appear in the title or this excerpt, then Ghost SodoSearch will not find those posts.

Jannis: Maybe to give an example, if. I have a post with the title, the best tomato plants, and in the content, I have a body that starts with in today's gardening journal of the month, we are talking about the new tomato plants, then the Ghost search itself would not find the term gardening, for example. You can find the post by the keyword tomato, but if you're just looking for a broader spectrum and you want to search for all the gardening posts on a blog, then with the native Ghost search, you wouldn't find that, right?

Chris: Yeah, and there are also some other limitations. For example, you cannot search pages in SodoSearch, which is something that Vellumine does, so you can also index pages. And there is also one very fundamental limitation that becomes relevant for larger publishers, which is that Ghost search only lets you search the last 10,000 posts.

Jannis: I mean, it makes sense on the one hand, because all the search is performed in a browser, so especially on, let's say, older and maybe smaller devices that can become quite an issue. But on the other hand, as you pointed out, for bigger publishers, that becomes a problem. I have had publishers reach out in the past that said, well, I've published my content for the last 20 years now, and I realized that there are maybe 15, 16,000 posts that they have published, because there are new sites, something that publishes on a very, very frequent basis. And I cannot find that one post that I know. I have published 15 years ago about a specific event. So how does Vellumine come in there? What do you do differently there? And what do you solve for those publishers?

Chris: Yeah, like I mentioned in the beginning, Vellumine is a managed search platform. So basically, I try to make the setup as easy as possible. You sign up, you enter the name of your site, your Ghost Admin API key, and the URL. And then Vellumine goes and pulls all your posts, pages, tags, and author information into the search index. The search index itself lives server side. So that's fundamentally different from how Ghost Native search works.

But it allows you to build an index that is like the index in the back of a book, where you can look up which word appears on which page, or in this case, which words appear in a given post. So this way, you are able to search much faster and also search through the whole content of your post and not only through title and excerpt.

Jannis: And that then also lifts the limitation of just 10,000 posts, right? That means you can index all of that instead of just having the most recent 10,000.

Chris: Yes, of course. You can technically index as many posts as you want, and the search should still stay fast. So we're talking about, in my experiments, like 50 to 100 milliseconds maybe, and that is while typing, right? So you already get results back while you're still typing your search query.

Jannis: So apart from, let's say, the indexing side of things, indexing more posts, but also pages, and the fact that it all happens on a server, on your server in this case, not on a Ghost server, are there any other benefits of why you say publishers, mostly bigger publishers, should look at different search integrations like Vellumine?

Chris: One big thing is, I would say, definitely the analytics. So you get analytics for what your readers are searching for. This includes popular search terms that your readers look up frequently, but also no-hit searches. So if your readers are looking for keywords and they are not getting back any results, Vellumine also surfaces that and shows it to you on the dashboard. So you can even go and get a feel for what are my readers looking for that they cannot find, and maybe you can even derive some content strategy or content ideas from that.

Jannis: That is super interesting. Some of the listeners might know that Magic Pages also has an advanced search integration that is, in that sense, essentially a tool for Magic Pages customers where it's similar to Vellumine. And when I tested a new feature recently, which was also analytics and showing what people searched, it was super interesting to see that, and it did surface some of the things where people just pasted entire error messages that they received in our customer portal into the search. And.

I remember sitting there and sharing my screen in one of our weekly team meetings and realizing if somebody is searching for a complete error message, that usually indicates that there is a problem with that, that there's something that we're missing, something that we're not solving for that. So it's probably a very interesting tool for bigger customers. Do you maybe have a typical customer where you say, that's somebody that comes to Vellumine to integrate that? I imagine it doesn't make much sense for people that just have a couple of posts, but who is your typical customer that you love working with or that finds extreme value in Vellumine?

Chris: Yes, you mentioned it already, right? Vellumine is really an advanced search tool that you would commonly need once you try to build a business on your publication. And you already have a certain amount of posts. If we are talking about a handful of posts and maybe you're just doing this as a hobby, then you're perfectly fine with Ghost's native soda search. But some of the users that signed up for Vellumine, they have around 200 to 400 posts.

So it's totally possible that in that range you might find yourself needing better search already. One of my users mentioned how they have difficulty finding their own content, right? They know there is a post where they talked about a specific thing, but they cannot find it anymore. And what you said about. The whole error message that someone might paste into the search field. In the best case, this is where Semantic Search would maybe come in if you're lucky.

Jannis: For someone that doesn't know what Semantic Search is, how does it help in that case compared to, I just type... Let's stick with the example from before. If I type tomato, how would Semantic Search help me in that case?

Chris: Yeah, so Semantic Search is something that came up. In the last couple of years because of the rise of LLMs, right? So what it basically does is it takes your content, your posts, and it shoves it through an LLM to turn it into a vector of numbers. And this vector is supposed to encapsulate the meaning of your post. So this is supposed to really distill what this post is about on a more abstract level than basic keyword matching, right?

And then what you do in Semantic Search is you get the ability to find posts. Based on not just keywords, but meaning. So if there are posts that talk about similar things or even the reader's query, you can find those posts without the user having to use the exact words in this post.

Jannis: As soon as you talk about LLMs and AI in that sense, does that mean that the content that I write as a publisher is then sent to a third-party company that would process that, or how does that work?

Chris: In my world view, that should really only happen if you explicitly consent to that. So on that. I mean, your content is not sent to OpenAI or Google to be processed by ChatGPT or Gemini. Instead, we use local models. So because Vellumine is actually based on typesense, like Magic Pages Search, typesense has the ability to use models that run on your own servers. So you do not send your content to third parties. That said, you could totally. Have that possibility if you wanted to, right? This is not currently a feature on Vellumine, but this is something that can be done. For example, if you provide your own API key and you say, but I do want to use ChatGPT or the OpenAI interface to generate my semantic embeddings, that is something that could be done.

Jannis: Cool. Another similarity that we both have is basically that neither of us has started their business, their project from the get-go and we both ended up more or less on the side of another job. So you already mentioned that you basically read a book. You've then decided you want to try building a tool that supports the ghost ecosystem from a fellow, let's say, site business entrepreneur. How is that going for you? How does that work for you? And how do you manage your work between your main job as a developer and running Vellumine?

Chris: In regards to how it's going, it's still early days, but yeah, I was not ready to take the risk of quitting my day job and start a big thing. So this was really after I read that book an epiphany to me. I somehow, it seems straightforward, but I never really considered, oh, you can actually start a small thing, not raise millions in venture capital and then build something sustainable on that bootstrapping model. In regards to how that works next to a full-time job, of course, it's a lot of work. You have to manage your time very well. And when you start your own business, suddenly you're not just a software developer anymore who implements a given piece of software for your employer, but you are responsible for the whole pipeline, right?

You're not only developing software, you are responsible for customer support, for marketing, developing new features, maintaining old features, managing your infrastructure, monitoring, all those things. But yeah, I chose this consciously because I wanted to, first of all, gain this experience and I always wanted to try and get out there, start my own thing and yeah, really put my skills to the test.

Jannis: A sentence that I've always said in that regard, when people told me that, yeah, you should think about doing this full-time, I always told them that actually having a full-time job or. I mean, I've scaled my full-time job down a little bit now because Magic Pages has had quite a bit of success recently, last couple of years. But the one sentence that I always lived by is that my full-time job was always my superpower because it really gives you the ability to not think about rent coming up. It gives you perspective and it gives you maybe not finite runway where you say after 12 months. I need to have that business running because otherwise.

I can't afford to live anymore. But yeah, I really see it as a superpower where having a job on the site while you build your business enables you to do so many things and ultimately also gives you the freedom to actually be closer to your end users, I think, to not have to report to investors and have to fulfill duties in that regard but it really makes sure that you're building something that is close to your users and that also serves your users in that sense. Speaking of users, how is the feedback going? So you've launched Vellumine and June. Before that, you had a beta, right?

Chris: Yeah, I started the beta in February on the Ghost Forum. You don't know what to expect before so. I have this tendency to either be completely like this is not going to work. Nobody's interested in this, right? Or be on the complete opposite end of the spectrum and be super hyped and oh my god, someone posted a response on the forum. This is going to take off now, right? So yeah, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

So it took a couple days for me to be noticed at all on the forum when I announced the beta but then I was surprised by how much people engaged with my post. And then I started the beta. I had a couple signups and that was also really the most valuable, right? The reason why I started the beta to get some first users to get feedback about is this really what you guys need? Because in the end. I want to provide or. I want to build a service that provides value. And if I'm just building a nice little add-on that doesn't actually fulfill your need then I might as well not do it.

So I was lucky. I got some users that were really willing to give me feedback on a couple of things. It's small things like they were saying oh, if I look for this or that word. I was hoping that this post would show up but it doesn't. And then you investigate. Okay, why doesn't the post show up when they search for this word and you find out oh, it's actually because they use hyphenated words. And the way I set up my search index it regards hyphenated words as one word.

So if you search for the second part of the hyphenated word you do not find the post. Small things like that but this is ultimately what makes or breaks it. And yeah, I launched the full product in June, basically on the 1st of June. Had a couple trial signups since then and even one or the other conversion. So overall. I would say it's going well. I just need to figure out how to maybe get in front of more people with this. Hopefully it's not annoying but I need to be on people's toes a bit and find out so what is it that you need, right? Please tell me. Can I make this product better for you?

Jannis: You just mentioned something very interesting which was people coming to you with feedback and expecting certain posts to show up from certain words. Having built a search myself for the last one and a half years that is the number one reason of why I dig deeper into search all the time. And I find it very interesting to see how the expectations differ sometimes and it also showed me that search is such a complex product where you might enter one word. In our case this is for example custom domain. How to connect the custom domain to your magic pages site. And we have one article that is three years old and if you search for custom domain on magic pages you get lots of other posts that are ranked higher because they're more recent and they also talk about custom domains.

How do you handle the balance between. I want to show the most relevant posts but also there's evergreen content might be a little bit older.

Chris: So yeah that's a very tricky thing. I recently added some kind of advanced filtering panel that can filter by authors post or even date range. But of course if you don't know what tags you're searching for or what author you're searching for then this still doesn't help you. What I plan on doing is give users more control over how things are weighted in the search. So you could say some users expect that the title of the post is a lot more important than the body content. This is usually a natural thing but some user might want to have it the other way around. They have some other expectations according to how things are weighted in this ranking.

So ultimately. I want to give users control over that for them to define it themselves. But it's tricky. How do you expose that to the user? How do you give the user this possibility without just letting them enter a bunch of numbers into some fields which still doesn't really give you a feeling what effect it will have on the search results. But yeah regarding that evergreen content there is a feature that. I have in mind which I don't know if we should talk about that already. It's entirely up to you. If you have posts like that and you know they are evergreen and people are constantly looking for them there would be the possibility in the future to basically make them pinned.

So if a user searches for certain keywords like domain you could pin this post to the top and say. I want this to always appear at the top. That's currently not supported but definitely a thing that. I would consider adding. And another way. That you could approach this for example it doesn't quite solve the problem but in Vellumine you can also define common search terms and popular tags which get recommended to the people or to the reader who searches while the search bar is still empty.

So they basically open the search bar and they are already presented with a selection of common search words which you can either define yourself or have them be driven by the actual analytics to guide your readers to the content that you think they should be able to find. Still doesn't quite solve this problem that maybe your post about domains gets buried the older it gets but I think with this pinning or curation feature this is something that could be solved.

Jannis: It's super interesting because that's kind of where we came from from that perspective. So I think it was yesterday or the day before Sviatoslav who works in support for Magic Pages wanted to send someone that post about connecting a custom domain to their site on Magic Pages and we have those common searches set up in our search for example. And obviously one of the main reasons what people want to do with their site is to connect the custom domain.

So that is one of our common search terms and he then clicked on that and I sent me a screenshot and just asked Jannis why is our post about connecting a custom domain the 11th search result and he also suggested the curation and he actually sent me a documentation of typesense that has a feature like this but it is a topic that comes up all the time for me at least in search. How are things ranked and how are publishers expecting things to be ranked and as you said you can always give more and more options to customize that but I think there will always be those little edge cases in there on how certain things might surface that people are not expecting quite the way they do surface.

Chris: Yeah you need to think about how to develop this feature so that users would actually engage with it because what I'm seeing on my platform is that. I have a bunch of features that I launched with now like the dynamic suggestions feature where those common search terms or the popular tags are actually derived from the search analytics so it's based on what your readers are actually searching for and very few people use that.

So somehow either because they didn't find it or because they didn't quite understand what this means and it's the same with synonyms and stop words and barely anyone is using that. First of all it can be a hell of a lot of work to configure all of your synonyms but so this is already a signal like nobody or very few people are using that why is that? Is it because they don't need the feature or is it maybe cumbersome to use it if it's the latter? Is there something I can do to make it easier for them? Yeah very interesting.

Jannis: I do think that especially a platform like yours is built for publishers that have the need for something like this. Listening from the outside. I think that especially synonyms can be so powerful because we all understand different terms differently depending on which direction we're coming from which also kind of leads me to. My next question. Is it before that you need to kind of get on people's toes and get in front of four people? So I'm actually wondering who is your ideal customer? Who do you say would profit the most from Vellumine?

Chris: So we talked about that. Basically both of us built a search integration right? The main difference is that your search integration is built into magic pages and I think the appeal of Vellumine specifically is that it's constructed to be a drop-in replacement of Ghost Native Search and this also means it's not important what platform you're hosting on. You could be hosting on GhostPro or self-hosting your blog or host it on whatever, DigitalOcean.

Jannis: You could even host on magic pages. If you love synonyms that we don't have you could very well use Vellumine.

Chris: If you want the slick dashboard with the analytics. Then you can use Vellumine by being on magic pages. So yeah but mainly for people that are on other platforms that I know you also open source your solution so technically people can set this up themselves but that would mean they need to spin up their own server where they run this type sense search engine and. That also means maintaining it themselves and that's typically not something that non-technical people like to do.

So if you are someone who wants to focus on their content publisher that really wants to just focus on their content and you want better search. For your readers and to get analytics to know what your readers are searching for you don't want to deal with infrastructure and setting this whole search infrastructure up yourself. Then yeah Vellumine is the tool for you.

Jannis: I just want to underline that there are different hosting providers there are different team providers and there are also different search providers now. It's a super interesting field and before we started the recording here we talked for quite some time about the different solutions and different issues that we also see and while the ghost type sense search that magic pages publishes is open source. I do think personally that Vellumine is a way better fit for most people that are on other managed hosting platforms because as you said somebody that posts their site on let's say Synapse Media, Ghost Pro, Midnight any of the other managed hosting platforms they do that for a reason they do that because they want to have their ghost blog and they want to write on that but they don't want to take care of all the technical stuff that's going on maintaining a server updating a server which as we saw recently with Ghost having security vulnerabilities as well is becoming more and more important and while I love our own search it is super cumbersome to set up you need to have a type sense server you can also host it with them but then you know that's an additional expense that you have there you need to have a webhook connection and so on so for people that do want to have a really really great search independent of where they're hosting it.

I do think that products like Vellumine are amazing and you know I've played around with the thought of offering a hosted search somewhere but then I always came back and I said no we're doing one thing we're doing one thing really great and I really love seeing that the other people that do other things really really great and that we have those specialized tools in our ecosystem same as we have you know theme developers that are really great at developing amazing themes.

Chris: yeah that's a good thing actually it's also my philosophy when you're developing a product right you should focus on your core and really make your product. Be excellent at this one thing. So yeah you already mentioned the headaches of setting up your own server of course you can also technically host it with typesense cloud offering although that gets kind of expensive quite fast so my highest priority was always to not break my user's search right ultimately your readers should get the best search experience they can have. I really took care to have enough redundancy and fail saves so that really your welcoming search experience should not break.

Jannis: and you know what I just realized that stuff like this is. Obviously good engineering practice or best practice in the sense that you have that redundancy and that starts with in your case search it starts with the fact that magic pages services be it the database services or our compute is all redundant and that's where again I'm very biased in that but that's where managed services like magic pages and velamine have a big advantage obviously split all of those costs you split that cost among all the different customers and if I were a single customer setting up a typesense server or a database server in that sense. I would do one server because if I just run one block setting up three of those or whatever number it is it just doesn't pay off but.

That also means on the other hand. I don't have that redundancy. So if I need to do maintenance on my self-hosted block and I need to upgrade my database or I need to upgrade my search server then that block is offline for ideally a couple of minutes sometimes if something gets screwed up then for a little bit longer so I love that philosophy of always building redundancy from the beginning so totally get where you come from that was also a big learning for me that it lets you sleep a lot quieter when you know okay even if that stuff breaks at 2am you know you can keep sleeping and deal with it in the morning because there are other servers it's obviously not great if that happens but it's better that one out of three servers breaks instead of one out of one.

Chris: yes.

Jannis: and been there than that in the very beginning it's not fun. Yeah. I want to look a little bit beyond search maybe and talk to you about the Ghost ecosystem as a whole because both of our businesses exist because we have found gaps Vellumine exists because you saw that the built-in search had gaps in how it served bigger publishers and how it served publishers that wanted to find specific content on the searches Magic Pages exists because hosting Ghost was either expensive or very technical in setting it up so is there any field where you say there is a gap where third parties can still fill that gap in that sense something where you say okay there is a need that you see with publishers in the Ghost ecosystem that can be filled or do you think that we kind of have everything covered now?

Chris: We certainly don't have everything covered things can always be better but this kind of goes back to what I said earlier about do one thing well right. I have ideas of where I could take Vellumine and expand and put more and more features in it but then you have to decide is that still one product or is that a different product? So from the top of my head. I actually can't name a gap that would be a good niche to fill right now because. I would probably try to do that.

Jannis: Fair, very fair.

Chris: although also always need to consider your own, how do you say.

Jannis: resources?

Chris: Your own resources and not risk burnout so maybe it's not that good of an idea to have a full-time job and two bootstrap startups so let's start with one.

Jannis: I haven't tried it myself to run two businesses on the site but I think one is fairly enough.

Chris: What are you thinking in terms of a gap in the Ghost ecosystem?

Jannis: Yeah. I mean I come from my own experiences and. I do see there is an image editor that is very proprietary where I don't think that there is like a business opportunity there but there's obviously something where the community can come together and provide the solution so hint hint that is also something that magic pages will do in the next couple of weeks an open source image editor for this but what I find super interesting is how whenever I think we've done it now we've created an amazing ecosystem there's usually someone on Reddit that jumps in out of nowhere and presents a new solution that you just haven't thought about there is you know Vellumine as a search engine there are e-commerce solutions for Ghost now that tap into the existing Stripe connection so that you don't have to spin anything else up but you just have you know like kind of like a sidecar to Ghost and you create this e-commerce online shop for that there are now solutions out there that add more subscription options other than Stripe to Ghost.

So yeah I do think that this is a very interesting market and obviously it always has the risk involved of well what if somebody pulls that into Ghost itself so honestly same as for you. I don't have anything and mind from top of my head but I love the creativity of our community of always thinking. In a very creative way of making Ghost better and figuring out solutions that you know. When you look at it seems so obvious but nobody has ever within the effort of actually doing it.

Chris: yeah definitely and you as a hosting provider you have a longer lever even than me because you can integrate more sidecars as you mentioned in your hosting offering right. I was thinking about possibilities of integrating the analytics that I mentioned before like the popular search terms. I have nice graphs for that that show you how those search terms were searched for over time and the no hit queries how I could integrate those maybe into the Ghost admin panel because that would be the most seamless solution for publishers right ideally. I want to have everything in one place now we have the Ghost Native analytics that show you which posts perform well and how your audience interacts with that wouldn't it be great to also have the search analytics right next to that turns out to be a bit tricky because from the outside.

I have very limited ways of modifying your Ghost admin panel basically I don't have any you as a hosting provider you have ways of injecting stuff into the admin panel like you also did with your existing what do you call it customer portal but me from the outside with Palomine. I have no way of modifying that admin panel.

Jannis: you know it's very interesting because we are trying to actually go away from that because we we noticed that it's kind of like this full circle moment three years ago in the beginning of magic pages. I had an external customer portal but then at some point. I figured out that it's actually quite easy to pull that inside Ghost so I thought this is great people don't need the external customer portal anymore they can have everything together and now we realized like half a year ago that there's actually so many things that we want to show people about the Ghost site that can be advanced analytics can be you know they're billing that can be something very simple as multi-site management that you simply cannot do in an integrated panel like this.

So yeah we are going away from that we will probably still have like an integrated panel that shows the basic information but all the main information will be somewhere outside. I think that yeah we have all of the opportunities to do those things and what I always believe in is that we shouldn't overuse that you know site cards for example are perfectly fine but people still sign up for a managed hosting provider to get the experience of Ghost and if you modify that too much then you might confuse people but you might also just dilute their experience with Ghost and tailor it in a way that they don't expect too much especially when they come from somewhere else maybe.

Chris: yeah. I mean the thing that you mentioned with multi-site management where this external customer portal really becomes relevant it's the same in Bellamine basically because you can also create multiple collections so one collection is the same as one Ghost site and the external dashboard just lets me create the experience for you to be able to manage all of those collections in one place at the same time I'm still aware that you want to focus on your content and your audience so that's why I built this convenience of having your search analytics sent to your inbox as an email once per week.

So that you don't have to necessarily log into your dashboard to see the gist of what people looked for if you want to see of course graphs over time and compare what did people look for this Christmas and what did they look for last Christmas to maybe do some trend analysis then of course you don't really get around a dashboard like that.

Jannis: yeah but I think that's that's a very interesting approach because you obviously have two different needs on the one hand. I want to dig into the data as you just said what happened last Christmas what happens this Christmas where do I maybe have a gap but then also realistically publishers on Ghost or on any platform their site is probably a tool for them and it's not their main business for most of them they have their head somewhere else sometimes so surfacing that as an email is very very smart because it's also the stuff that I look at sometimes so. I have an SEO tool that I never log in that I maybe log in like every like once every year or so but every week on Monday.

I get an email from them that says hey like here's your search rankings and here are the keywords and here's how they moved a marketer would now tell me that I should act on that and I should log in and then fill the gaps and everything for me it's just super interesting to actually see how volatile that is so I love the idea of sending emails for stuff like that.

Chris: and it's still opt-in right you have to explicitly tell you have to explicitly say. I want to receive this email.

Jannis: which is the nicer way than my SEO tool which just does it. And I don't think I can opt out because it's an American tool. So yeah.

Chris: yeah well that's also a point we didn't talk about yet right like we are located in Europe so all of my servers are also in Europe or in Germany more specifically so all of those things that you might be used to from some American tools where they send you emails without you asking for it that's not something that we are even allowed to do we need your consent for that.

Jannis: yeah. I have one more question if you had the chance to sit down with John the founder of Ghost and you requested one thing from him in the Ghost ecosystem is there anything on your mind where you say Ghost should tackle that.

Chris: so I cannot tell from first hand experience but someone told me that John gave a statement sometime last year when there was this whole WordPress thing going on that he said he wanted to invest in the ecosystem more right.

Jannis: he said that in a talk he had at a conference that's on YouTube I'm going to link that.

Chris: in the show notes that is where it would start right to get the support from the official Ghost Foundation that at least they give you some visibility if you are a serious business building on Ghost. You are providing a valuable tool and then they could start by giving you a shout out right to further the ecosystem to develop the ecosystem and just be like hey people look there is this cool new tool if you have this demand maybe this fills your need of course I'm daydreaming about you know in the Ghost documentation there is a page where it says if you need more advanced search try Algolia. So if I get to the point where it says if you need more advanced search give Vellumina a try then I did it.

Jannis: well I see two points here you know Ghost does have a huge database of integration which are mostly right now say peer connections that they surface so I do think that there is a very good point of also showing dedicated Ghost integrations there that are purpose-built for Ghost and the other point about the documentation it might just be worth trying it because the documentation is open source now and anybody can submit PRs to a repository yeah but you know not from a. I want to have my tool promoted but from a community perspective of showing that sometimes there are more tools than what is in the official documentation. I always see that in the hosting field as well there is not just magic pages many of them and when I talk about hosting on our own blog.

I usually try to show you know the diversity we have in there so it would be really nice to maybe try that and maybe. I want to do that today in the evening as a little evening project to try to see how far a PR can go for the search documentation whether we can get Valium in and some other search tools in there as well.

Chris: I already feel very honored for you wanting to try.

Jannis: the one thing I learned is you just have to try and you just have to see how far it goes.

Chris: you mentioned this Ghost integration directory right they have a page where they list all of the officially. Endorsed integrations. I think at the bottom it says they are not open to submission they basically populate this page based on customer demand. So if there are enough customers on Ghost Pro let's say hey. I want to use this integration or can you give me a guide to how to set this up then they add this there right.

So yeah I need to gain some visibility and get a bit established first I think before that happens and the other thing of course we didn't talk about that yet but one limitation currently is that you need access to your admin API to synchronize your content with Valium in some hosting providers. In their basic starter tier you don't get access to your admin API this is also the case on Ghost Pro so in that case you currently wouldn't be able to use Valium in and maybe back to that point when I reach that point of getting Valium in not on the custom integration tab in the admin panel but on the first party integrations then I did it at least that's what I feel like now.

Jannis: then we're gonna have a party yeah. But yeah I you know. I do think that the official integrations page is maybe a different wheelhouse than to documentation and I do think that adding options to documentation is worth it because Algolia is not the only search that's out there there are you know other proprietary tools there are other tools like yours based on open source technology there are complete open source packages which also means. People need to stand up their own servers and everything and manage that if a documentation should show us the options and show us. In that sense if you need advanced search or if you need more advanced search options.

That also means there should be variety of tools so let's see how far that can go we'll see in two weeks on the other hand. That also means if the integrations are based on actual customer demand if you want to see Vellumine in the integration tab then sign up for it give that a try and message Chris with all your feedback that you find.

Chris: yes I'm always hungry for feedback yeah this is what drives the development of the tool really because. I have a vague idea but ultimately I cannot know what you need to solve your problem right.

Jannis: and that's always the fun part figuring that out step by step and finding those really really niche use cases that actually make so much sense that you haven't thought about yourself and I love that about building a product and engaging with people on a daily basis. So yeah any feedback always send it to tools that you use. I bet that there are just very few out there that will not act on that or that will you know just jot it in a drawer somewhere and never look at that again so Chris is there anything that I should have asked that I didn't ask is there anything I missed anything that you want to tell people.

Chris: I think we talked about pretty much everything at this point the only thing left for me to say is really what we already iterated on in the podcast if you feel like in the current Ghost Native search does not serve your needs you cannot find the content you're looking for or maybe you even get requests from your readers saying hey don't you have an article on this because I couldn't find it right or maybe you have more than 10 000 posts then give Vellumine a try and tell me what you think.

Jannis: Chris thank you so much for taking the time for sharing about your tool and your journey how you've come to Ghost and Vellumine and yeah thank you to all the listeners for listening and have a lovely rest of your day wherever in the world you are.

Chris: thank you very much for having me. I feel very honored to be on this podcast already after really just launching in the beginning of June. So yeah thank you to all the listeners.

Jannis: it was my absolute pleasure and yeah you know. I do see that as this collaborative spirit that we have in the Ghost community you have just launched a product. It deserves to be heard by more people. That also means if you're listening right now and you're building something for Ghost and you want to share it with the world with the Ghost community then reach out. I am doing this every two weeks now sitting together with people hosting, publishing and building on Ghost.

So if you know someone if you are building something yourself like Chris then just reach out and we'll schedule something to record the podcast together. So yeah as I said thank you for coming on the podcast Chris have a lovely rest of your day and goodbye.

Chris: thank you too bye bye.