The Pivot from Substack to Ghost: An Automation Journey

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ā€” 1 min read

Ever since I set up the GitHub Action workflow, I've been thinking about using a newsletter tool to automate my blog post over to my audience. If you haven't read my blog, it is here:

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The Connective Tissue

I wanted a way to write my blog posts in markdown and have them automatically appear in my newsletter. While Substack is a great platform, its lack of a developer-friendly API makes automation feel like a "hack." I've learned that Ghost has an official API and can be used to create another worklow from markdown to html. So I've decided to give it a try.

Today, I moved from "manual vibes" to "technical enablement."

What I Learned

  1. API vs. Scraping: Using a headless browser (like Playwright) to mimic a human is cool, but using an official Admin API (like Ghost's) is professional and stable.
  2. Data Transformation: I learned that my Jekyll "Front Matter" (the stuff between the ---) needs to be peeled off before a blog platform can read the story.
  3. GitHub Actions: My GitHub repository isn't just a storage box; it's a tiny computer that can run scripts for me every time I hit 'Save'.

The Setup

I'm now using a Node.js script with gray-matter and marked to translate my local Jekyll files into Ghost-ready HTML.

If you see this post on my newsletter, the automation worked. šŸš€

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