When I stumble upon an unsolved or undocumented problem and solve it, I like to document it here.
Preparing for re:Invent 2025 If you've been following this blog, you might have noticed things have been quieter than usual. The technical deep dives, infrastructure walkthroughs, and problem-solving posts have slowed to a trickle. There's a good reason for this temporary silence - I'
Ghost CMS provides excellent newsletter capabilities, but lacks a built-in way to automatically send weekly digest emails summarizing recent posts. Building this feature requires understanding Ghost's Lexical editor format, coordinating between Ghost's Content and Admin APIs, and preventing duplicate sends. The solution uses EventBridge for scheduling,
When we moved our Next.js MDX blog to Ghost on AWS, we needed to preserve Markdown editability in Ghost's editor. Most migration guides convert content to HTML, making it non-editable. Here's the complete migration tool we built to handle MDX files, images, and Ghost'
Ghost CMS provides a powerful webhook system that enables deep customization beyond its built-in features. By building a centralized webhook router with AWS API Gateway and Lambda, you can create a scalable foundation for Ghost integrations. This post explores our production webhook architecture and demonstrates its power through a real
Running Ghost in production requires more than just high availability - you need a comprehensive backup strategy that ensures business continuity when disasters strike. This post details a production-ready backup implementation using AWS Backup that provides automated backups, monitoring, and rapid recovery capabilities for both your database and content. Understanding
Running Ghost on AWS requires visibility into application performance, system health, and user experience. Without proper monitoring, you're flying blind - unable to detect issues before users complain or understand what went wrong when problems occur. This post details a comprehensive monitoring setup that provides complete operational visibility
Ghost recently released ActivityPub support, enabling Ghost blogs to participate in the Fediverse alongside Mastodon, Threads, and other federated platforms. Through extensive testing and production deployment, we discovered that the official ActivityPub container has a bug that prevents self-hosted ActivityPub deployments from working. Combined with AWS-specific networking challenges, we had
Ghost handles email differently than most CMS platforms. It ships with newsletter capabilities built-in but requires external SMTP for transactional emails and lacks automated digest features entirely. This post covers setting up both transactional email through Mailgun and building an automated weekly digest system using AWS Lambda and EventBridge. The
Running Ghost in containers presents a storage challenge. Container filesystems are ephemeral - when a container restarts, any locally stored files disappear. This includes all uploaded images, making local storage unsuitable for production Ghost deployments on ECS. The solution uses S3 for persistent storage and CloudFront for global content delivery.
Ghost requires a MySQL database, persistent storage for content and images, and a way to handle traffic at scale. AWS provides these through RDS Aurora, EFS, S3, and ECS Fargate. This post walks through deploying the core infrastructure using AWS CDK, which allows us to define everything as TypeScript code