By The Chimp — 14 Mar 2026

So You Finally Got Ghost Running — Now What?

If you're reading this, you probably just spent way longer than expected getting Ghost installed. Maybe you fought with Docker networks. Maybe Caddy kept throwing 502 errors at you like it had a personal grudge. Maybe SQLite decided to quietly refuse to work in production mode and you had no idea why.

Yeah. Me too.

I run my blog at blog.thechimptalks.ca on a self-hosted VPS — Ghost behind Caddy, MariaDB as the database, the whole thing living inside Docker Compose alongside my other tools. Getting it running took an embarrassingly long time. But once it was up, I realized the installation was actually the easy part.

The real question is: what do you do next?

Here's everything I did — and everything I wish someone had told me on day one.

Step 1: Get Into Your Admin Panel

Your Ghost admin lives at:

https://your-blog-domain/ghost

This is where you'll spend most of your time. Bookmark it now. Everything from writing posts to changing your theme to managing members happens here.

When you first log in, Ghost will walk you through a basic setup wizard. Don't skip it — it sets your site title, timezone, and a few other things that affect how your blog looks to the outside world.

Step 2: Set Your Timezone Correctly

This sounds small. It isn't. Your timezone controls when scheduled posts go live. If you're in Toronto like me, you want:

Settings → General → Timezone → America/Toronto

That's GMT-4 right now (EDT). Ghost handles daylight saving automatically once you pick the right city. Don't just pick "GMT-4" manually — use the city name so Ghost adjusts on its own through the year.

Step 3: Fill Out Your Site Identity

Go to Settings → General and fill everything in:

Site title — your blog name
Site description — one sentence about what you write about. Mine is something like "Building AI systems and automation tools in my spare time, documenting everything."
Logo — upload one. Even a simple text logo looks better than nothing.
Cover image — the large banner image on your homepage. A dark, moody image with good contrast works well for tech blogs.
Icon — this becomes your browser favicon. Use a square version of your logo.

Don't overthink the logo at this stage. A plain image with your blog name on it is fine. You can always swap it later.

Step 4: Turn Off Membership (Unless You Actually Want It)

This tripped me up. Ghost defaults to showing newsletter signup prompts and membership CTAs everywhere on your site. If you're just running a pure blog with no plans for paid subscribers or newsletters, this looks messy and confusing to visitors.

Turn it off here:

Settings → Membership → Subscription access → set to "Nobody"

And while you're there:

Settings → Email newsletter — turn this off too unless you're planning to actually send emails.

This cleans up your blog immediately. No more "Subscribe for free" banners interrupting every post.

By default Ghost shows a minimal navigation. Go to:

Settings → Navigation

Add links that make sense for your blog. For a tech/build-log blog I'd suggest:

Home → /
About → /about
Projects → /projects (you'll create this as a page)
Tags → /tags (optional, lets readers browse by topic)

Keep it simple. Four or five links maximum. Navigation that tries to do too much ends up helping nobody.

Step 6: Create Your Core Pages

Pages in Ghost are different from posts. Posts show up in your blog feed chronologically. Pages are standalone — they don't appear in the feed and you link to them manually from your navigation.

Here are the three pages worth creating on day one:

About Page

This is the most important page on your blog. People click it before they decide whether to keep reading. Don't just write a resume. Write something human.

Tell people what you're building, why you started, and what they'll find here. If you're self-hosting a stack of tools and documenting the journey, say that. Readers connect with specificity.

Example:

I'm a builder based in Toronto. During the day I work in logistics. At night I build AI memory systems, automation pipelines, and self-hosted tools — and I document everything here. This blog is my public build log. If you like reading about real systems built by real people, you're in the right place.

That's it. Short, honest, specific. Way better than a bullet list of skills.

Projects Page

List what you're actually building. Link to relevant posts where you document each one. This page turns your blog from a collection of random posts into evidence of an ongoing body of work.

Uses Page

One of the most underrated pages in tech blogging. List your stack — your server specs, your tools, your software. Developers love these pages and they get surprisingly good search traffic.

Example format:

Server: Hostinger VPS, Ubuntu 24
Reverse proxy: Caddy
Containers: Docker Compose
Automation: n8n
Database: NocoDB + MariaDB
Vector search: Qdrant
Blog: Ghost (Journal theme)

Simple. Useful. Yours.

Step 7: Set Up Your Tags

Tags are Ghost's version of categories. Each tag gets its own page at /tag/your-tag-name where readers can find all posts on that topic.

Create your tags before you start publishing so you're consistent from post one.

For a self-hosted tech blog I'd suggest:

build-log — your primary tag for everything you've built or debugged
docker — anything Docker related
self-hosting — VPS, server setup, infrastructure
n8n — if you write about automation workflows
devops — deployment, configuration, tooling
ghost — meta posts about the blog itself (like this one)

Every post should have at least one tag. build-log goes on almost everything. The others are for helping readers filter by topic.

Step 8: Configure Your Theme

I'm running the Journal theme. It's clean, readable, and looks good for long-form technical content without needing any customization.

To change or configure your theme:

Settings → Design → Theme

If you want to browse others, click "Find a theme" — Ghost has a marketplace of free and paid themes. For a technical blog, look for themes that prioritize readability: clean typography, good code block styling, decent mobile layout.

Once your theme is active, spend a few minutes in Settings → Design → Customize — most themes let you set accent colors, font choices, and homepage layout without touching any code.

One thing worth checking: paste a code block into a test post and preview it. Some themes have terrible code block styling. If your theme makes code look like this in a painful way, that's worth fixing before you publish technical posts.

Step 9: Set Your Post Meta Defaults

Before you publish anything, go to each post and check the Post Settings sidebar on the right. This is where you set:

Featured image — shows in previews and social shares
Excerpt — a short description that appears in post lists
SEO title and description — what shows in Google results
Tags — assign your tags here
Publish date — for scheduling

The SEO description is the most commonly skipped field. Fill it in for every post. It's the one or two sentences that show up under your link in search results. Write it like you're describing the post to a developer friend in 30 seconds.

Step 10: Write at Least Three Posts Before You Tell Anyone

This is the advice I ignored and regretted. When someone clicks through to your blog from Twitter or a search result and there's only one post, they leave. There's no reason to stay.

Three posts gives people a reason to browse. It signals that you're serious. It makes the blog feel like a real place rather than an experiment you might abandon.

You don't need three posts before you set anything up. But before you share the URL publicly — three posts minimum.

The debugging post you just wrote about your Ghost setup? That's one. Write two more. Then share.

Settings → General → Social accounts

Add your Twitter/X handle and any other profiles. Ghost uses these for metadata — when someone shares your post, the right social card shows up with your name attached.

If you're on Twitter at @chimp_talks, add it here. Small thing, but it ties your blog identity to your social presence from day one.

The Honest Summary

Setting up Ghost the right way takes about two hours if you're methodical. Most people spend five minutes on settings, publish one post, share it, get no traction, and assume blogging doesn't work.

The foundation matters. Take the time to:

Set your timezone and site identity
Turn off membership if you don't need it
Create an About page that sounds like a human wrote it
Set up your tags consistently
Have three posts ready before you go public

After that, the only thing that matters is publishing consistently. One honest, specific post about something you actually built is worth more than ten generic articles about tools you've never used.

Your stack is unusual. Your story is interesting. Document it.

Follow the build at @chimp_talks — I post about self-hosting, automation, and AI systems built on a budget.