About this episode
Mark Alexander is a Melbourne-based technology writer and the founder of Tech That Fits, where he reviews gadgets through one deceptively simple question: does it earn its place? He lives in a roughly 40 m² studio with his partner Colin — the creator of Never Too Small — so "tech for small spaces" isn't a category on the site, it's the whole starting point.
Mark joins Jannis on his path to Ghost as a complete newcomer: evaluating Webflow and WordPress first, choosing Ghost for built-in memberships and newsletters, and then — with no prior Ghost experience — building his own custom theme, partly with the visual builder Fantasma. They get into creative homepage touches (a robot vacuum that drives around the page), a repeatable review framework, reaching readers through Google and Apple News, and the road from CES and IFA to Indiecon in Hamburg.
Chapters
- 0:00 — Welcome — meet Mark Alexander
- 0:29 — What Tech That Fits is
- 1:16 — Living small with Colin, and Never Too Small
- 3:24 — Tech that earns its place — the Samsung Frame TV
- 4:15 — Why Ghost, after Webflow and WordPress
- 7:05 — Replying to the Indiecon post — and a first custom theme
- 9:36 — Fantasma, the visual Ghost theme builder
- 13:00 — Creative touches — a robot vacuum on the homepage
- 15:13 — Publishing frequency and a review framework
- 16:59 — Colin's role, and smart-home war stories
- 20:56 — Google News and Apple News
- 24:05 — From CES and IFA to Indiecon
- 26:00 — Singapore, and Hamburg's creative scene
- 27:34 — The future of Tech That Fits
- 29:44 — How to get an Indiecon ticket
Links & mentions
- Tech That Fits — Mark's technology-reviews publication, built on Ghost
- Never Too Small — Colin's small-space design channel & magazine
- Fantasma — the visual Ghost theme builder Mark used for v1 of Tech That Fits
- Search Off the Record — Google's Search Central podcast Mark recommends
- Indiecon — the independent publishing festival in Hamburg, 4–6 September 2026
- Episode 4 — A Web Hosting Company at a Print Festival — why Magic Pages is going to Indiecon
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 Mark Alexander, a Melbourne-based technology writer and the founder of Tech That Fits. Welcome. Good to have you on.
Mark: Thanks, Jannis. Thanks for having me.
Jannis: Mark, can you quickly introduce yourself for people who don't know you yet? Who are you? What do you do? And what is Tech That Fits?
Mark: Okay, sure. I guess I've always been quite a big fan of technology. Not just what's new, but how technology changes the way we live, and Tech That Fits has become my creative space to explore that. I do this with Ghost at the moment, covering tech news and reviewing products, but I'm also developing some guides. I kind of want my site to help people get more from the technology that they already own, as well as make better decisions when it's time to upgrade. I guess with Tech That Fits, we're looking at how useful the tech is, whether it's thoughtfully designed and whether it's actually pleasant to live with. I live with my partner, Colin, and our dog in a small studio apartment.
It's about 40m2, and in a small home, everything you bring to it has to really earn its place. You become very much aware of the space that something occupies and whether it actually solves a problem, or if you even continue to use it after the novelty wears off. My partner, Colin, is the creator of Never Too Small, which originally started as a YouTube channel, and lots of cleverly designed small apartments, and now it's expanded to different types of media. Colin's recently just launched a magazine, which explores more joyful ways to live and design through some of Colin's partnerships. I get exposed to a lot of new tech, and all this has contributed to the way that I judge technology, particularly how it's used in small spaces.
Other publications touch on these ideas, but I wanted to make that kind of tech in small spaces a starting point rather than an occasional category.
Jannis: The one thing that really stood out to me when I read through your site, your blog, specifically the About page, is the premise that you always judge tech based on the question, does it earn its place? As a tech person myself that has, just looking around, my office cluttered in tech? That is a premise that I should probably take a bit more serious. Is there a particular bit of tech that you've covered in the last couple of weeks where you say that definitely earned its place, something that really stands out for you that people should maybe have a look at?
Mark: Good question. I guess it's easier to find a lot of tech that doesn't fit a place, especially a small space that me and Colin live in, and that's sometimes another way that the tech in our apartment is judged. It's very much judged by Colin, and whether it aesthetically fits our apartment. We have a lot of cool tech in our place, Samsung Frame TV, for example. It's great that when you turn it off, it just blends into the background, blends into our gallery wall we have.
Jannis: I've seen the Samsung TVs like that in a lot of places, and I think the last place was actually an Airbnb in Bergen, in Norway, where we stayed, where at first you barely saw that it was a TV. So that is definitely something that I can see, especially in a small space that. It makes so much sense, I think.
Mark: Yeah, we always get people come over and they don't realize it's a TV until we hit the button and turn it on to a TV.
Jannis: Yeah, cool. You have decided to start a publication, Tech That Fits, and you ended up with Ghost. So now the main question that the audience probably has is, why did you choose Ghost? What was the journey to get there and have you compared Ghost to anything else on that way?
Mark: Ghost initially wasn't the platform that I was going to choose to develop the website on. I did sign up to a few others to kind of test them out and to evaluate, and I guess I spent a few months on another platform, and I spent a bit of time just upskilling some existing web development skills I had. But the more I began to develop things in the background, ultimately I decided that newsletters and memberships were going to be quite important to the future of the site. When I looked back at things I was evaluating, I felt like, you know, Ghost has all that built in from the start.
So I thought, yeah, that kind of ultimately helped me decide. And then I guess the same reasons every other Ghost publication has chosen Ghost. Ultimately you want to remain some kind of ownership over everything and flexibility. I think it's a great way with the membership system to get to know your audience, and. I want to develop a publication that listens to the feedback of my audience and use that to help me influence the development going forward.
Jannis: Can you just share, if you want to, what platform did you evaluate before Ghost? You said you spent a couple of months there.
Mark: So I spent a bit of time on Webflow and WordPress. WordPress I had used a few times before with a few different things. I ultimately found that to be quite clunky. And I can see from WordPress's development blogs, they're getting ready for another version, which is built from scratch. I decided against using WordPress. And the kind of platform I did spend a bit more time using and developing on was Webflow. But earlier this year, they actually took out their membership features and discontinued it for new customers. And they're kind of moving away from that. That helped me decide against using Webflow.
Jannis: I didn't know that they discontinued that. That's definitely an interesting move, yeah.
Mark: Yeah, they discontinued it from their kind of core package. And there's since been a third party app that has another subscription layered on top to add that kind of feature in.
Jannis: Interesting. Yeah. The reason why we're sitting here today is that you actually replied to a post that we posted on the Ghost forum in regards to Indiecon, the publishing conference in Hamburg. That's happening in September. And you mentioned that you started freshly with Ghost and that you were building a custom theme. And that was the hook where I thought somebody that has just started with Ghost, somebody that then decided, okay, I'm going to build my custom theme. That is someone I definitely want to talk to because we've had voices on the podcast so far from people that spent a couple of years with Ghost already, people building tools on Ghost with us, Magic Pages, hosting Ghost, but never from somebody that had no Ghost experience so far and then jumped right into developing a custom theme.
So can you tell us a little bit about that, how you started that, also maybe what prompted you to actually say, okay, I need a custom theme.
Mark: One of the reasons why I saw your post on the Ghost forums was because I was using the forums as a way to look into other people's publications and as to how they were customizing things and seeing how people had customized the other themes in general. I guess I'm quite a creative person when it comes to web development and I ultimately knew that I wanted to customize the way everything was going to look. I guess that because I had developed the first version of Tech That Fits within Webflow, I had a bit more creative control over the way the pages were designed and I felt like just using one of the Ghost templates restricted me a bit. I ultimately know that once I've got a few more posts that.
I want to have a more creative way to display them all together. For me as well, I wanted a way that I can showcase some of the tech from the never too small episodes into some of my pages without actually putting the content into my database or copying that content over. So, I've got some custom codes that are going to be able to fetch content that never too small hosts.
Jannis: You also mentioned that you've used a tool that is in a way quite similar to Webflow. It's Fantasma, which is a visual page builder, a visual theme builder for Ghost. Can you tell us a bit about your experience with that? How have you used it and what did you like about it? What were maybe the struggles with it?
Mark: Yeah, I was really happy once I saw Fantasma on the Ghost forums. I think one of the struggles I was having with using Ghost at the beginning was to customize the templates and to customize the way things are displayed, especially having different sections on my website, wanting to do some quite advanced filters on tags that are attached to posts. Fantasma was great just to let me quickly build version one of Tech That Fits website. Yeah, because I do have some more advanced knowledge of web development, I still go back to editing some of the code and adding in some custom integrations, which can be a bit troublesome with Fantasma, because if you make any customizations to that template, ultimately, once you change it again on their site, those changes are overridden when you press publish.
Jannis: Yeah, that's the Ghost publishing mechanism that doesn't work well with uploading new themes and keeping some of the history there. So that's probably an extra step that you have in the publishing workflow there of having to download the Fantasma theme, applying your changes and then uploading it to Ghost, right?
Mark: Yeah, I think for me, I've been trying to optimize the website to independently run, but ultimately, I want to push content to services like Google News and Apple News to help draw in an audience to use those sites as a channel to advertise on. Yeah, that's why I kept doing custom modifications to some of my code.
Jannis: And what's the ultimate visual identity that you want with Tech That Fits? Is there some more customization that you have in mind or is it mainly the tags and the sections that you've added now that you wanted from the custom theme?
Mark: Ultimately, I know that version one of the site is going to look very different to version two because. I am reviewing a lot of tech products. I am going to break those up into categories so they're a bit easier to find. And I think at the moment, it would look a bit silly to have a category page with just one or two reviews. So in the future, that's what I'll look at adding in. I also want to do just a bit more customizations that just add a bit more creativity to the site. Currently, on my homepage, if you're viewing it on a desktop, there's like a pop out cover of the latest Never Too Small magazine that appears on the side. I want to also add in some full kind of widgets that might appear around the side.
Earlier today, like I'm just getting ready to publish a review on a robotic vacuum. I've just wrote some custom code that will have the actual robotic vacuum driving around the white space on the side of my website that will be clickable, that will take you to that post. Yeah, so I was just looking at creative ways to showcase some of my posts on different pages. The same for maybe linking to a podcast that I'm listening to on the side, having a bit of a retro iPod that you can click and it launches into a podcast I might be listening to. I also want to use Tech That Fits as a way to showcase other publications and link to other websites that are of interest to me and then hopefully of interest to the Tech That Fits audience.
For ghost publications and just websites in general, it can be quite lonely as a solo editor. So I'm always a big fan of collaborating with other people, hence why I'm on this podcast with you as well. I think that's a great way to promote your site to different audiences. Somebody listening to this podcast might have an interest in tech in small spaces and then visit my site.
Jannis: Yeah, and it's also just great to share your creativity in there and to just listen to the ideas that you have because now hearing you talk about a vacuum robot going over the white space, it's such an obvious thing that you can do when you review a vacuum robot. But to get there and to say, well, I'm actually going to take the time and build this just as a little gimmick, as a little creative exercise and as a way to capture somebody's attention. That is something a lot of people can learn from as well. And I'm really curious to see how that's going to work and what robot you're going to review because we have two at home. I'm not very happy with either of them.
Let's put it this way. You also mentioned now that you are publishing all of that yourself, that you're solo publishing the articles. And the one thing I've noticed is that you have a very high frequency of publishing. Slow down now a little bit, I guess, because you've launched just a couple of weeks ago. But especially in the first couple of weeks of having your site online, you published a couple of times a week, like sometimes two or three times a week. How do you see that going forward? How do you want to sustain that? Or the better question is, what's the frequency you're aiming for?
Mark: I guess my aim at the moment is to try and publish two or three reviews a week. And what I've been kind of developing at the start is a common framework that I can use to help me review these products. I think having a regular kind of format helps the audience have some kind of expectation as to how a product might be reviewed. And from an editorial point of view, like having that framework just gives you a template to stick to and focus on. And for my audience, if there's a robot vacuum, for example, having a standard format that I use to review those different products in that category, it makes it very easy for someone on my audience to compare two products together.
Because the aim with Tech That Fits is that we can help our audience choose the product that we're going to fit in their place.
Jannis: With the angle of making sure that it's tech that fits, you also mentioned that Colin always has to judge a tech product that goes into your guy's apartment. Does he also have a part in the review process then for Tech That Fits?
Mark: If you read some of the reviews, there's a couple that have Colin's comments in the background. And I guess for us in our apartment, I'm the technical side of the relationship. And I know now from experience that I need to make sure that anything I implement in home works without too many quirks. I'm always testing out some smart home products, some lights that doesn't always quite maybe work how it should or doesn't integrate into the Apple home system that we use and it needs a physical switch, doesn't work with voice, things like this.
Jannis: My wife, Mariia and Colin would have a lot of stories to share then because same here. Implementing lights, I think that the latest thing that worked well, we implemented a new light a couple of days ago that essentially turns on when at night you pass, so it illuminates the way to the bathroom. That went well. But. I remember one of the other things I implemented a couple of months ago already, which was a smart lock at our door. All of a sudden, the door was just unlocked all the time. And Mariia just said at some point, this is an actual security issue. Like, why is this not working? And I was just sitting there at my laptop and giving her the technical details.
And she just said, still, I don't care why it's not working. It is not working. The door is unlocked. And that was for me that awakening moment where I also had that mind shift really of, yeah, like there is somebody else here as well that needs to live with that tech. So I can relate a lot to the sentiment of, in your case, tech that fits. And in my case, it's probably more like tech that just needs to work without having all the little bits and pieces around it that need to line up. So, yeah, I guess the two of them would have lots of stories to share.
Mark: Yeah, definitely. I think living with Colin, one thing I've learned always to do is try and add in a physical switch where possible. I have a lot of those IKEA smart switches that will just turn things on and off. Yeah, they definitely help, but we still get randomly lights flashing because I've lost Wi-Fi signal or something like this. We're just in the matter of upgrading some of our smart lights from Wi-Fi bulbs to the matter ecosystem just to give everything a bit more stability.
But also me suddenly deciding to run the beta version of iOS 27 so I can get access to the new Siri Assistant has kind of broke some of those things.
Jannis: Yeah, for us, it was moving into this new apartment here, which basically has two floors. So we have some offices up here where I'm currently. And that meant all of a sudden you have a lot more surface area to cover. And especially with smart home, that got very interesting at some points where our smart home hub, which is Home Assistant in our case, is at the very, let's say, front of the apartment. And we are now here at the very back and one floor up. And some of the lights in here in my office, for example, just wouldn't work anymore.
So it's those things where then the whole night all the lights were on up here because I just couldn't figure out how to bridge that gap. And the only solution was to turn electricity off in this room. So it's interesting stories like that with smart home sometimes, sometimes not so very smart.
Mark: Yeah, I think an upgrade to Home Assistant is in our future. And that's definitely going to maybe be a series on Tech That Fits, that upgrade.
Jannis: It does sound like a series, yes. And I'm very intrigued to hear how that goes in the end. You've also mentioned before Google News and Apple News, especially Apple News I've personally never looked into. Do you already see some results from that? Do you see that people come from Apple News to your site?
Mark: I haven't yet finalized an integration with Apple. There's an approval process with them with Google News, though. Yes, you know, being Australia based, there's not too many tech blogs to compete with. So especially in posts where I'm writing about something in the tech space in Australia, it's very easy to rank and to get traffic from Google.
Jannis: Cool, interesting. And how hard was the integration with that? Can you maybe just like on a service level, can you share what you had to do with your Ghost theme to get integrated there?
Mark: Yeah, it actually wasn't very difficult for Google News integration. It just involved me within Ghost creating a custom HBS file. Yeah, which basically displays just posts from the last seven days. And I specifically get it to only show posts which have a special tag, Google News, so that I can control what content is sent out to that channel. And I guess for anyone listening who wants to do something similar, yeah, it's pretty straightforward. I dove deeper into the way that Google News algorithm works. And definitely, if you integrate with Google, they favor sites that regularly post. And in that XML file, they only want to see posts from the last seven days.
So if you're not posting multiple times in a week, then it may be difficult to get any traction with them. Yeah, there's a Google Developer podcast I like listening to search off the record. Yeah, it's quite interesting. It does a bit of a deeper dive on how Google looks at your website and what's important to them.
Jannis: Nice, I'll link to that in the show notes. And I'll see if we can put something together on the Magic Pages site as well for Google News and Apple News.
Mark: Yeah, I'm happy to share with you what I did, and it's very easy to customize.
Jannis: Cool, thank you very much. Are there any other distribution channels that you're looking at, or are you mainly relying on the news aggregators in that sense?
Mark: Mainly on those two at the moment, I guess me, I have been looking at ways in which I can draw some traffic to my site. Another reason why I'm attending Indiecon, I find that a lot of in-person events, it's much easier to explain and talk about and to make connections with people.
Jannis: Indiecon is a good keyword. While we've been emailing about Indiecon, you've also mentioned that you went to CES in Las Vegas, you went to Milan Design Week, going to IFA in Berlin before you go to Indiecon, or while you go to Indiecon, essentially.
Mark: Yeah, in the middle of IFA, yeah, which would be interesting. I attended CES in Las Vegas earlier this year. That was pretty eventful and pretty hectic, I think. There was about 190,000 people attending CES this year, and IFA is like the European version of the same thing. And I think IFA this year, they're expecting around 220,000 people, so it's going to be busy. Yeah, I'm lucky that I've got a media pass. I get to go into the event a couple days early before the general crowd goes in.
Jannis: Right, but you're essentially going from one of the biggest events in that space to a tiny publishing conference with probably 2,000 to 3,000 people in total, yeah. 2,000 to 3,000 people is still quite a big event, I think, yeah. I think for the indie publishing space it is, yeah.
Mark: Yeah, and an international event. Like I see that Indiecon now have the list of everyone who's going, and yeah, it's quite interesting. There's someone else from Melbourne going as well, another publication. Yeah, so it'll be a good opportunity to network around and to get talking to other publications, and yeah, get some ideas on what's working for them, and that work well for me, and yeah, some collaboration, some maybe crossover.
Jannis: Nice. For Indiecon specifically, apart from the collaboration, have you had similar events already? Smaller publishing events, do you know of any others that are similar to that?
Mark: On my way to Germany, I'm stopping off in Singapore for a similar event they have. Colin is attending with me for that event. Never Too Small this last week has just launched issue 8 of the magazine, and it has a bit of a Singapore flair to it. So yeah, we're going to go to Singapore and attend a similar event, and yeah, showcase the latest issue of the magazine.
Jannis: Cool, nice. So maybe you're never too small at Indiecon 2027 then.
Mark: Maybe. I think I mentioned to you as well one of the attendees of Indiecon, the coffee table mags shop that's based in Hamburg. Yeah, they sell a lot of never too small magazines, and they have a lot of international prints. Yeah, so there must be something about Hamburg. Does it have quite a big creative scene? Have you been before?
Jannis: Yeah, I've been to Hamburg a couple of times, and there is in fact, yeah. There's like a big creative scene, both in let's say in the arts, but also in like publishing, also in digital creativity. Lots of where I come from, web development, web design, and so on. Some of the bigger advertisements firms are also in Hamburg, or like the bigger ones in Germany. Yeah, it is. For me, if I look at Germany, having lived in Berlin, we obviously have a big creative hub in Berlin, where lots of things happen, and then personally, I would say Hamburg is like the second bigger one within Germany.
Mark: Yeah, yeah.
Jannis: I have one last question for you. Big picture. Where do you see Tech That Fits in the next couple of years? Where do you want to develop that to?
Mark: There's been so many versions of Tech That Fits in my head, as to how it started and how things have developed. Yeah, I want to expand to some other types of media, potentially video. I would like potentially to interview some of the Tech That Fits audience on their kind of favorite tech devices. I think because I travel a lot with Colin, and I'm in the background of a lot of filming of the Never Too Small episodes, maybe there's an opportunity for me to interview some of the people in the homes that are featured in Never Too Small, maybe to have a deeper dive into the tech that exists in their background. Never Too Small focuses a lot on the architecture and the design, and you often see a lot of tech in the backgrounds of videos, because there's tech everywhere in everyone's houses.
Yeah, I guess there's a bit of space maybe where I could interview people on how they use that tech on what's important to them, and how it fits into their space and their life and things.
Jannis: That's really cool, and I sometimes watch videos, maybe not so much architectural videos, but other videos where people are interviewed and I spot things in the background, and I'm very curious about those things. I love to see that as well, just to see how people are integrating tech, especially in a way that it's not too obvious, or that it just fits into a space. So it sounds really lovely, and I'm looking forward to seeing how your site develops. Yeah, thanks. Perfect. Then, yeah, thank you so much for the lovely time that we spent together for giving us some insights into tech that fits into your world of publishing, where you come from, and also your insights into conferences and in-person conferences. Looking forward to meeting you, Mark, and have a lovely rest of your day.
Mark: Yeah, we'll see you soon.
Jannis: See you soon, bye-bye. Bye.
Now, if this conversation with Mark sparked your curiosity, and you want to come to Indiecon in Hamburg as well, I've got good news for you. We still have a couple of tickets left, so just drop a quick email to help@magicpages.co, and maybe we'll see you in Hamburg as well. It would be really lovely to meet more of you, and also to have dinner with Mark, myself, and a couple of other people. For now, that's it, and yeah, thank you for listening, and goodbye.
