Welcome to another episode of the Creator Toolbox. This is the show all about the nuts and bolts behind your creator business. I'm Colin Gray from thepodcasthost.com, joined by Jacob, as always. How you getting on, Jacob? Really, kids? Yeah. It's a sunny day in Scotland for the first time in weeks, so I'm happy. So I've got a nice room. You can see Edinburgh Castle. Yeah. If you're watching on the video, you can see the nice setting. Jacob's in a jealousy
inducing place with Edinburgh Castle right behind him. But if not, you should just imagine a blue sky, which I know it's hard to imagine in Scotland. That happens every now and again. How are you getting on this week, Jacob? Good. It's been a busy one. Got a lot of things out the door. Got a new blog live for the creator toolbox, which was really exciting. Let's get into that in a wee village, certainly, yeah. What about you? Same,
actually. Quite a bit of creating, actually. A good bit of writing. Some landing page stuff. Do you know, I've had a good fun, actually doing something around. I did something which we talked about a little bit around our, I don't know, strengths and weaknesses. Like, it's almost back to an old. If you're listening, you've ever worked in a big corporation or anything like that and done any consultancy or anything like you might have heard such a thing as a SWOT analysis. Yep.
Which is like such a. It's just a funny thing, isn't it? I was going to say such an old fashioned thing. It's not at all, really. It's just. It's the kind of thing that us as creators or alternative types of businesses think that is completely irrelevant. Like, it's just something that corporates do to waste time, but actually, like those kind of things, they just work. So, yeah, I went through, like, where are we actually strong right now with our
content? Where are we weak? What are the opportunities? What the threats? That's what SWOT stands for. And it was really interesting, actually. It brought out a whole bunch of stuff and it'd be good to share some of that in the coming weeks on here on the Creator toolbox. But a big part of it was around content, actually, the creator Toolbox blog as well. One of our weaknesses is that we are really reliant on just one channel of content right now for marketing, for a lot of what we do.
And for better or worse, Google is great at sending traffic sometimes and then just decides they don't like you the next day and stuff like that and come back and forth. And we've survived the whole helpful content update Armageddon over the last twelve months a lot better than most. But it's still scary to see like drops and traffic of 1015, even 20% that sometimes come back, sometimes don't. And it's crazy. It's up and down. So that's
a big part of this, isn't it? Yeah, I mean there's people with blogs similar size to ours that practically overnight went from a few hundred thousand visits a month to just hundreds or low thousands, which is effectively 95% of their income. Really, really scary. Full sites closed down and ones that have, you know, the whole idea is for them to surface. Well, their claim was it would surface more helpful content, genuine helpful content. And so many of the sites
that you see the case studies around are, that's all they've been doing. It's just like us, like all you do is try and write good stuff that helps people out and it's still targeted. But anyway, enough about that. There's plenty of that out there. Yeah. The point being that it was really worthwhile doing it. Like really spending half a day thinking about what are the strengths, what are the weaknesses in our content and our company and
our team, all that kind of stuff. And that was one of the biggest things that stood out. So we've got a bunch of plans around tackling some of those weaknesses and really leaning into some of those strengths as well. But the blog's a big part of it, so. Yeah, why don't you tell us? It's good to jump into this one first, what is the creator Toolbox blog? Well, blog for the podcast. Similar sort of topics, tools, workflows, mindsets for your creative business, right?
Kind of from when we started this podcast. We talked about having a blog. Just got a bunch of episodes out, figured out the format, figured out more or less what it is that we're going to speak about. And then, yeah, we decided that we're kind of going to do it. And I mean, when did we start building the blog? Maybe like a month ago, a month and a half ago. Started writing some posts to get on it and kind, kind of didn't talk about
it or publish it in very many places. Popped it into a few newsletters somewhere near the bottom, you know, just to gauge. Got that live now we've got a few tool reviews on there, we've got a couple of workflows. The idea really is to complement this, isn't it? It's talk about the same types of subjects, but actually stuff that makes more sense written down,
or it's maybe even just complimentary, isn't it? As in we'll talk about a subject, but actually it's good to see the summary of how it's done, be able to read through something that revises it. And actually a big part of it I always talk about with podcasts. Like one of the things that people miss in podcast growth more than anything else is text search. We've just moaned about Google, but it is still, and it will continue to be for a long
time. Even if Google itself dies off. Even if so much search goes towards AI, AI is still searching text content and surfacing that as well. So it's just another place to be found if we're answering good questions 100%. And there's some things that we will talk about on the podcast that we just can't go into every minute detail. One, because sometimes you actually need to sit down and write down to get all of the detail out of your head. And that detail is not always available and
it wouldn't make great content expand on things. And it means that, like you say, we can rank for the same kind of things that we're talking about on the podcast. People find us on Google and we'll have our podcast episodes embedded on the website. We'll have links to the podcast as well. It'll help us build a bit search presence, but also help us grow
the podcast as well, which is cool. Yeah, I'm quite excited actually about experimenting with some more tactics around how to make a podcast really useful on the web, because there's tools out there, probably talked about a few of them, get into more detail in future. But like pod page, really good tool. We know, Brendan, that makes it really well, and there's so many great tools in there. It makes a site really simply and easily for a
podcast, and it is great for any general podcast. But equally, you can benefit a lot from custom tools just for your approach and the types of things you talk about. And if you have the capacity to develop a site and test out different things and see, oh, does this suit our audience really well? Or is it something else? Another approach? I'm quite excited about trying to do that, like trying to build out what does a great podcast website actually look like in
24, because it's probably changed a lot over the last five years. What are people looking for? And a lot of that might be talking to our audience here. Are you listeners out there? Like, what do you want from a text version of these audio episodes or video episodes. So I'm quite excited about that, actually. Yeah, it'll be good to see. That's taking up most of my week, getting that stuff done. Is blog the right term these days? We still use the
word blogging because that was kind of what we grew up in. You're a lot younger than me, so maybe you're a different perspective on it. But is it a blog? Like, is that the right term for it these days? I would call it a blog. It's as much a blog as the podcast host is a blog, I think. What's the difference between a blog and a website? A website. So I would say a website is more of a marketing tool. You've got maybe like a
website, a blog, and then apps. A website might be so like, Altoo has a website where we explain what the tool is, we explain how it works, all that kind of stuff. But then there's a blog, there's a great toolbox, and that has sort of articles on it. And that's more around sort of teaching, I think, more, and teaching more around picking apart particular topics. When I worked in an agency, the differentiation was you'd have a brochure website, and a brochure website was essentially just.
That was a digital brochure. And we would do that for small businesses, we'd do that for property developments and all that kind of stuff. And then you would have a blog. And a blog can be part of a website. Yeah. Differentiation. It's something around. It's by a person, isn't it? Specifically, like you go to any random website which is about a topic or whatever. It might just be like a landing page of sales thing that you're talking
about. It's never necessarily. Each page isn't necessarily by a particular person. My differentiation generally is a web log. A blog is generally a person writing about something that they know well or something inspirational or something funny. It's from first person. It's like, I did this, I did that. Or I think that's the difference. And that's why often they resonate well, because it's a real person and that you can get to know and follow and just a philosophy, rather structure.
Yeah, I mean, a website is typically quite. Yeah, it's quite anonymous, I guess. So, getting into tools, then. Let's talk about how we did it then, this time around. So that's the idea for this start of this episode, at least. What was it you used to build it these days? Had a look at a few different tools. And the one that I landed on was called Ghost. So Ghost is an open source CMS like WordPress. But the difference is that it is really,
really, really easy to write in. It's really opinionated. I think going to be quite a lot quicker to get up and run, running what we wanted without complexity, like I really wanted to. I built the first version of it in a couple of days and I probably could have done that with WordPress. But the thing is, as time goes on and you add more and more things, you slow down because there's more complexity, there's more plugins to
manage, and there's more this and that and the other. So it's like WordPress, but much more focused. I think the downside to that is that it's a lot less flexible unless you want to start writing code. But even then there are some limitations. The thing about it is you've got a blog and a newsletter in one. So every blog post that you publish could potentially be
an email. Kind of got this built in membership system where people subscribe to your blog and, and they'll receive those posts that you choose to send as emails. But right out of the box you've got premium kind of membership side to it built in. In any given article, you could set up a block that is only for members. Anyone who visits the site can read most of the article apart from this block, which I found really, really interesting and more the kind of thing that was really cool.
That's probably not unique. Places like beehives and substacks of the world do something similar. I've never seen it with individual little parts of the post like I've often seen. You'll often see like half of the post is gated. So you'll read a couple of pages and then suddenly it's to read the rest. Sign up, seen it, whereby you can read a whole article, but you can take just one section. And one of your examples was around an AI
prompt, for example, wasn't it? Let's say we'll teach you how to create video clipping with AI, but actually the prompt that we personally use, that we've developed over time, that one section is gated, but you can read the whole thing. Other than that, I don't think I've seen that anywhere else. Really, really cool, because it means you can get an entire article, but presumably Google's little robots can't read it either. Therefore it's not going to get indexed.
But you can have the benefit of getting index and ranking plus having that, that sort of gating within the article, which is really really cool. Theoretically Google can read past gates, which is I always find a little bit weird cause there's tools out there. There's little, if you can simulate being a robot or there's little kind of hacks you can put on the front of URL's to be able to get past content gates, some types of them, because it's the way that the browsers do, the crawlers do.
So not exactly sure how the tech works behind that, but being able to have them just purely open and just that one part skated seems much more sensible. I mean with all that built in, then how techy was it like, was it very easy to set up or did you have to know about tech stuff? The whole thing can be done tech free. I went with the not tech free
route because I wanted the flexibility. So we self hosted it. That you can do with WordPress and most people do, but for most people there's a $5 a month subscription by Ghost themselves and they just take care of everything. All you need to do is pick a theme and start writing. So in that sense, yeah, it can be a totally tech free experience. There is one caveat and something that I think that ghosts need to make easier for most people, and that is setting up your blog groups.
So say you wanted example.com forward slash and then like a category, and it might be then you want every post in that book category to exist on slash boats slash in the post title. That stuff needs done in a, what's called a config file. It is code, but it's not very complicated code. You know, you're just defining anything that has this tag, put it into this route and that kind of stuff. That was not very user friendly. That's a weird
thing to make tricky. Like what? That's like such a basic thing of content creation is figuring out your hierarchy and your categories and your slugs and all that kind of stuff. I get the impression that Ghost was made first for developers and then made users friendly, which is why the route that I went, which was a bit more techie, I was happy to write some code. In fact, I wanted that flexibility of changing the theme and all that stuff. It was by far the nicest experience that I've ever had
working on blog theme code. I mean, out of what have I used? WordPress, Drupal, probably some other bits and pods, Drupal and all, and that blast from the past. But it was really, really nice, really, really simple. So if you're into writing a little bit of code. It's a very good experience. But equally, if you don't want to, the only thing to be mindful of is the blog groups. And I was actually thinking I might write a little guide on that
because it's not that hard. It might look scary at first if you're not sure what this file is. So that pro tier compares with I suppose, WordPress.com dot doesn't it like WordPress has the same thing where you can have a hosted version, so there's a few comparisons there. Like does it have plugins? Does it do the same kind of thing in terms of extensibility? So I actually thought it did and I was mistaken. It doesn't. What it does have is
a set list of integrations that they've created. There are some useful things in there, but the most useful thing is it does hook up to Zapier. So there's no plugins that will extend ghosts ability to do things that just, I mean, I looked into a bunch because I was actually quite angry. I was like why haven't you done this? But they're just so determined to stop it from becoming WordPress. And as useful as plugins are in WordPress, they do
become cumbersome. They don't play well nice together. They slow the site down, all that. So I do understand the reasoning, but by being able to use Zapier you do get a fair bit of extensibility. But yeah, you're not able to really change how ghost works itself. It's using external tools rather than internal. Yeah, but absolutely. I mean the more we used, I mean our main site, the podcast host, still does run on WordPress, but the longer we've gone on, the more we have actually outsourced tools.
Like even this week we've been doing another little bit of optimization, taking out we used to use gravity forms, which was a forms based tool, a plugin technically as a separate service, but it worked really strongly through a plugin that went into WordPress. But we've taken that out because it actually had a little issue with it. It had some kind of vulnerability or something like that. And we realized we're only using it on four or five pages. And actually we
love Typeform. Typeform is a standalone, really good form based tool that we can embed if we really want to, or we can just link out to a type. So yeah, the more we've gone on, the more we've gone away from plugins anyway, really Peter, on our team, who's a WordPress guru. He basically builds a lot of stuff for WordPress ourselves rather than relying on other plugins too, doesn't he? So yeah, pros and cons too.
I mean, I couldn't have done what we've done with this company though if it wasn't for WordPress and plugins in the early days because I had no capability to do that back then. All right, who is ghost suited to then? Who should use ghost compared to WordPress or anything else? Does it ideally suit for? Aye, good question. The trouble, there's no middle ground. It's going to be good for someone who wants a blog, a newsletter and the option to charge money for
some level of premium content out of the box. They just want to pick a theme and be done with it. Perfect for those people. Absolutely perfect. If you're just purely ship fast mentality, really recommend it. But on the other side, if you are someone who like quite explicitly does want to build kind of custom things in the theme and wants to be able to move quite quickly and building out their, their vision for a reading experience and all that kind of stuff, it's perfect for those people.
But if you want something in between, it's probably not going to be great for you. Like if you do want, and it comes down to the plugin thing, if you want to add little extra bits of functionality without writing codes, I would use WordPress because there's tens of thousands of plugins there that will satisfy you. But if you're really just determined to shit past, publish the email,
start a membership, then yeah, for me it's a no brainer. I've already started up my own, a little personal site on my own with it and I'm really enjoying it, you know, and all I want for that site is somewhere that I can go and write easily, share it, pick up some newsletter subscribers and that. That's it. You know, that's all I care about. I don't want to think about anything else. And for me, in that case, it was perfect. And for us for
this blog, it was perfect as well. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I've heard people talk about it as something you can graduate to ghost almost once you've got a bit of a team. If you do have somebody that has some coding ability, you've got a coder you can work with, or even an outsource or contractor, whatever. I've heard of people leveling up to something like ghost compared to WordPress, but then again, WordPress can do that
too. If you've got a team like we just said, we still do that with Peter. But the other, I suppose I first heard about Ghost as a replacement placement for substack. So it was exactly as you're describing there, like it was a substack. We're putting the prices up, changing around all their tiers, all that kind of stuff. And it was a few years back and people were like, it first started to come out as a too expensive substack.
Look, there's this thing called Ghost, though. It does exactly the same thing. It's a website, it's email, it's list building, essentially. So just go over to that. So that was where I first heard it. So maybe that's the main thing for it just now. Like, that was what I started thinking about when you wrote this down as a topic for today. It made me think back to a
few months back. I was looking at all of the different blogging tools, and not even just blogging tools, but it goes so much more diverse now. Do you just, you think of WordPress and Ghost, for example, as blogging tools? But like, what else do you think of these days when you think of building a website? Do you know, weirdly, not even a blogging post at all, but almost everyone has one of these, like a link tree. You know, that's the most basic
website that almost everyone has these days. And it's like, it's almost like you're my space for now. You know, it's your little space. It's got all your links to all your different things. But I think that maybe the lines are blurring a little bit between blog and email. And so I think things like beehive and Substat come up a lot. Don't want some republic, that's where they go.
First thing for me was both of them actually like Beyhive or I think I believe I didn't see when they first came out, but I believe they started very much email first, but almost public email focused, as in your emails were always published to the website anyway. And it's just so integrated, isn't it? Like, no one really runs a good blog these days without having
email anyway, having them so heavily integrated. And so when I, yeah, when I was looking into this recently, like it was just for a personal project too. It was beehive I went with in the end, because you can publish so easily, so quickly. Substack was a really close alternative. And the real kind of the benefit for them, for me, beyond Ghost and WordPress, was actually the growth network more than
anything else. So you could do pretty much all you want to do with a blog, as in you can publish stuff online, you can then send out an email to people, you can offer subscriptions, blah, blah, blah. But then again, you do that. How do people actually find your ghost blog or your WordPress blog? You have to do a lot of marketing in some way, but actually be Hive and Substack both have pretty heavy growth tools built into them in the form of,
with Substack and behavior. They both have the referral system, so you'll have seen it, Jacob, like when you sign up for a substantial newsletter, what happens after you hit subscribe? You're getting recommended other similar publications. It's got that discoverability built in which you don't get with like your own kind of locked off blog, your own thing, you know, being part of a network of other blogs. It's like medium, actually.
And LinkedIn are really good for that. LinkedIn's got blog posts on it now. I think you've got on a newsletter on there, technically. Yep, absolutely. Yeah. And that's really valuable, having that discoverability built in, because it's a major thing for most people starting a blog is how am I actually going to get people to read it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's come back to LinkedIn in a minute.
That's a really good point, but just finish off on them. Like Beehive has gone beyond, I think, that referral, and they've built in as well paid advertising and more partner type relationships. And that's their big thing. There's no point in publishing if no one's going to see it. So we're going to build a standard, a decent publishing platform. It's not going to be as customizable or it's quite limited compared to a
WordPress site and probably compared to ghost as well. But you can publish content on the web and their thing is they'll help you grow up, essentially. That seems to be my read on their focus, and that makes so much sense, actually. Have you tried any of those features on that personal project? So what I've tried so far in that realm is convertkits referral system. So they're tricky. Like convertkits, one is in the form that you essentially have to do all the legwork yourself.
So you have to reach out to other creators. You have to find out who's on Convertkit first, then you have to reach out to them. And then you have to make an agreement around. Yep. For promoting my newsletter, I'll promote yours if you do, or I'll pay, but it's all done manually. And then that creator has to manually add you as a recommendation to their account. So there's no facilitation, there's no networking, there's no kind of automation around that, which I think is a real big mess.
And I'm sure Convertkit's thinking about that because they're a fast moving team and everything, but it seems to me like substack and be. In fact, I think substack may actually be similar to convertkit in that sense, but beehive is making it much more systematized, productized. Yeah, they're leading the way for sure in that kind of stuff. Everyone talking about them makes it look that way. Not tried it personally.
But that's a really interesting point. On LinkedIn, like social, I mean, you could quote, well, Twitter was like microblogging originally, wasn't it? What's the downside to that? Is primarily not owning it, isn't it? Yeah. Is that, is that a total turn off for using LinkedIn as a blog? Well, it depends what you're wanting to do if you're wanting to build an audience or,
I mean, I guess it's kind of the same thing in both. The advantage of LinkedIn is you've probably already got network there, so any content that you post there is going to get more eyeballs straight away. And there's nothing to say that you couldn't do a bit of both. How is that working for you? Because we've. I think we're actually just repurposing our pointers newsletter, Howard. I mean, it's up to 700 subscribers, so it's a small fraction compared to our
main list. Our main list is about 25,000. It's like 6700 people that are actually using LinkedIn pretty extensively. They've opted in on there. It works well. Have you found that that's increased the engagement of your regular posts on LinkedIn? Because that's the thing that really attracts me. Really? I don't know. Never actually. I've not correlated that for sure.
Yeah. If you keep up regularly, it's got to help because the, one of the cool things that facilitates comments, that's one thing that is a struggle on a traditional blog, is that collaboration, the communication, the community side of things, because it's just spammed so badly. Like we, we've switched off comments a long time ago on the podcast host because it's just pure spam. You occasionally get a good proper comment, but rarely.
And really, where people are putting them, those comments are on social. So if you're blogging on LinkedIn, it starts conversation. And if you're putting your newsletter on LinkedIn, those conversations happen there, too. And no doubt that then increases your visibility with those people in future, as soon as they post a comment, you're suddenly kind of ranked up in their algorithm, all that kind of stuff.
So. Yeah, and then their followers as well. That's. That's a good thing about LinkedIn, is it's quite direct in that way, because, I mean, you often think how many times you've gone through your newsfeed and you just see someone that you're connected with, but they've commented on a post or they've liked a post, but you're getting visibility that way, which is cool. Yeah. I feel like a lot
of people are using LinkedIn to repurpose stuff like that, aren't they? Like, you'll create what carousels were quite in for a while, not sure if they still are or not. You take a blog post and you create like a ten slide slideshow out of it, stick on LinkedIn and then link to the blog post, that kind of thing. I've not seen a lot of people using it as their primary platform, but I think you're absolutely right. Like a lot of people and me, I'm included in this. I have a real
thing about wanting to own the platform. That's one of my struggles with social media in general, is the risk that it goes the way of something like Twitter, for example, which has just changed entirely over the last few years. You can spend so much time building an audience, and then it can really change, and it's all kind of wasted. Or even worse than that, it's like, remember Meerkat? No. Meerkat was one of the live broadcasting
type platforms. So you go in there and you just go live, audio only. It was kind of clubhouse for earlier, early days. Clubhouse. And that just. That, well, Clubhouse is another one just dies. Like, Meerkat literally disappeared. Clubhouse, I don't even know if it exists anymore. So you can spend so much
time, but they can disappear. It's the trouble of trying to get enough people onto that platform to make it work, because what we want about Twitter spaces actually has stuck around quite well on Twitter, which is the audio only live thing. It's because people are already there. There are already topics that they might want to start a space about. The same applies to, I think LinkedIn are trialing it as well. It's just the difficulty of getting people onto another place. And I think just to link
back slightly to your point about comments, it's the same thing. It's so much effort to, like, give your email address or sign up to put a comment, whereas if you're already on social media, you're already LinkedIn. There's the fact that, yeah, there's other people there that are going to see it. People are wanting to grow their thing, grow their profile, so they've got an incentive
to engage with things. And it's tough to balance the wanting to own it and have it be yours and not have that risk versus the place where the conversations are happening probably has the most juice to grow your own thing. They're in that mood, you're in a social mood, so you're more likely to comment. I think when you're there, there's something around a threshold whereby
you can't deny it's worth it, I should say. Like. Like YouTube. There's no one publishing their own video elsewhere on their own platform, are they? That is the platform to do it. There's no question that that is where you should be publishing video. There's things that have spun off and seem to do well. Like Linus, I think Linus tech tips, they wanted to start one of
their own. That didn't work out very well. But there's others that are like group of history youtubers that I watch, and I think they might call it Nebula, that might be one of the platforms. So they spun this off through youtubers. That's where they built their audience. But I. Then they went off and built this
thing, started this company, and it seems to be doing really well. You can build an audience and you can hone your craft on someone else's platform, and then that sets you up later to build out your own thing somewhere else as well. Interesting. Yeah. Okay, fair enough. The algorithm, I suppose, is where it's at, though, isn't it? It's just the discoverability side of things like LinkedIn, YouTube, if you want to be found in the first place. I mean,
I think there is a lot to be said for the repurposing side. Like if you are going to publish blogs on YouTube, on LinkedIn, for example, no reason not to publish them on your own site as well. We were just talking about Google at the start of this episode. How has your view changed on the benefit of owning your own thing when we're still kind of beholden to someone's algorithm? How does that balance out? I think we always will be.
I think that's the trouble. So that's the whole part of my thinking right now is just making a much bigger effort to diversify, to have more than one channel and have no one channel sending us more than like 60 70% of our traffic. Like cut it down so that you don't rely on anything for more than 50% of your traffic or
your income or your inbound or whatever, you know. But we're always going to rely on somebody's, as in, if we change that, we're going to be like, YouTube is one of the great alternative, but then they could change their algorithm.
LinkedIn again might be another one. There's always got to be channels out there and then you're trying to turn it into, I suppose, what we're talking about earlier, which is email subscribers, which is a real way that you can actually own the customer relationship because you can then push out to them, not expect them to come and find you every day, but you can push your content out to them as well. So it's really tricky. But I absolutely, I think I've probably softened on
it a little bit. And no, do you know what? I haven't because I still think you do need to own your own platform, but actually does need to go hand in hand with the other stuff a lot more strongly. For sure. That makes sense. But everything else should be directing back to your home base, really. You still got your mothership, which is your own platform, and all the rest of it is hopefully promoting that at the end of the day and
getting people onto your email list. Then at some point maybe email will literally die. People keep claiming emails, email is dead. It never has so far. I think it's still going as strong as ever. Maybe spam, maybe overwhelm, all that kind of stuff. We'll just tell it well and truly. At some point we need something different. That's why you need a podcast. Yes. That is actually a brilliant case for podcasts. It doesn't get much more independent
than that. With email you can be drowned in other people's spam that people didn't ask for. But with a podcast, they're making that conscious choice. This is what they're subscribing to. This is what they're looking out to. That's why we love popping up. Yeah. And their feed, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, for sure. You know, last one I mentioned, something cool I came across last when I was looking into it. My big requirement really was
with this new project. I wanted something that was actually ironically, given how much I've just slightly slagged off social, I wanted it much more. Social ish or social in form, as in it could be much more, micro bites could be much more. I could just write like 100 words. It's so the concept, it's one I've talked about a while ago. I think I mentioned on an earlier episode around being able to just log the good things in life. So if I go for a great walk,
I'll log that. If I have a great coffee, I'll log that. And it's designed for people like me, like probably men in their late forties who are into similar kind of stuff to me, and recommending things that you can do to make the most of your time, because life feels overwhelming when you're at a stage in life. And so I wanted it so that I could literally just do that out in the road. Like, I go to a cafe, I find a really cool cafe in this place, and I want to be able to log
that so people can find it and get that recommendation. It was something that I wanted to really be able to do from my phone, but to be able to put pictures in, to be able to even, maybe even record a little audio clip. So it needed to be bigger than social, but still very easy and mobile and work, even if it's only 100 words, something like that. That was why I think beehive really fits that in many ways, because it's simple, it does include all of those mediums and includes
the email side as well. And it's why something like WordPress and Ghost and things probably don't really suit, because actually the formatting of those sites just is so much more suited to longer form. And I've experimented with that a bit over the time. But, sorry, long way to say. Another really random one I found was one called Bearblog. So b e a r blog dot de v. Tell me all about it. The most stripped down
blogging platform you can ever find. Even its homepage. If you load up the homepage, if you're out there listening, load up that homepage just now and you'll see that the graphics are all ASCII pictures. You know, like kind of old school ASCII pictures made out of characters. That's a little bear. Yeah, exactly. A bear made out of characters. You can put images into the posts, but there's no real formatting, so it's really just plain text
and images if you want to. And I actually really loved the concept and the way it was all put together. And I thought there's definitely little projects that I've had that would really suit this approach. Love the fact it's totally, it's so small, tiny little pages. So it's just super fast. Just loads straight away. There's no trackers, ads, anything like that. Like, it's all kind of really minimalist and there's a few themes, but very, very minimalist
as well. It's just, it's really cool. I like it a lot. You can own it, you can connect your own custom domain, that kind of stuff. And there's no worries about devices and stuff like that, like whether it's mobile optimized, all that kind of caper, because it's literally just simple images and text. I could see myself using that in future. I will say in Ghost defense, if you want something with a little bit more fidelity, they do have really good themes
for short form stuff as well. One that's basically a ripple of Seth Godin's blog, which is the most famous short form blog in the world. Yes, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Okay, we'll keep that in mind out beer blog as well. I've got nothing to do with it. No affiliation here. I just really like the style and the ethos behind it. Love how simple it is. That is cool. We should say as well. Yeah, totally should say. We do have an affiliate link for
ghost, actually. So if you enjoy this episode and you go and try out ghost and you end up paying for the service, I'd love it if you use our affiliate link. So you can visit ghost via thepodcasthost.com forward slash ghost. That's g o h o s t for the spelling impaired. Thepodcasthost.com ghost. Nice. Thank you very much for that. All right, I think that's it for me this weekend. You want to cover? Yeah, no, I think that was so good in focus. It's unlike us to
a theme. Not unlike us to be good, unlike us to be so focused to a theme. Thank you. Cool. All right. Thank you out there for listening. If you do want to support our free content that we put out, love it. If you check out our product as well, which is called Alitoo. Alitoo is the podcast maker app that we designed six or seven years ago based on making podcasts our own way and with our own bare hands. And it's designed to make it really easy to edit, really easy to publish.
It's got call recording and editing built in as well. All of that kind of stuff. What are you laughing at? My ads gone off all over the place here, isn't it because we've been. Talking about bare bug, our own bare hands. I just imagine doing bare minimum. Sorry. Keep going. Nice. No, you're right. I was going all over the place there anyway. Alitoo Al I t U.com. alitu.com makes podcasting easy. That'll do. Thanks very much.
All right, cheers. Thanks again for listening. We'll talk to you next time.