Ghost — User Guide

Electric Monk lets you spin up a personal Ghost blog at your own subdomain (yourname.electricmonk.io). Ghost is a modern, open-source publishing platform with a clean editor, newsletters, and built-in ActivityPub federation — your posts can be followed from Mastodon, Lemmy, and other Fediverse apps.

Each user account gets one Ghost site.

Creating Your Site

1. Go to portal.electricmonk.io and sign in
2. Click Ghost Site in the top navigation
3. Fill in the creation form:
   • Site Title — the public name of your blog (e.g. "My Awesome Blog"). You can change this later inside Ghost.
   • Subdomain — the URL prefix for your site (e.g. myblog → myblog.electricmonk.io). Use lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens only. This cannot be changed after creation.
4. Click Create Site and confirm the dialog

Provisioning takes a few seconds. Once the portal shows your site as running, it is ready.

Choose your subdomain carefully. It is permanent and cannot be renamed.

First-Time Setup — Set Your Admin Password

Ghost does not create an admin account automatically. You must visit your admin panel immediately after the site is created and set your credentials, or anyone who reaches the page first could claim ownership.

1. In the portal, click the Admin link next to your site, or navigate directly to https://yoursite.electricmonk.io/ghost/
2. Ghost will show a Create your account screen on the first visit
3. Enter your name, email address, and a strong password
4. Click Create Account
5. Optionally invite team members or skip that step

Your admin panel is now secured. You can reach it any time at https://yoursite.electricmonk.io/ghost/.

Writing Your First Post

1. In the admin panel, click Posts → New post
2. Give your post a title and write your content in the editor
3. Click Publish → choose visibility (Public, Members, or Paid) → Publish

Your post appears on your site immediately.

ActivityPub — Fediverse Integration

Your Ghost site is ActivityPub-enabled. People on Mastodon, Lemmy, and other Fediverse platforms can follow your blog and see new posts in their feeds.

• Your Fediverse handle is based on your site URL, e.g. @index@yoursite.electricmonk.io
• Followers receive your published posts as ActivityPub objects
• You can see follower counts and manage federation under Settings → ActivityPub in your Ghost admin panel

Customising Your Site

In the Ghost admin panel (Settings):

• Design — choose a theme, set your logo and cover image, tweak colours
• Navigation — add or reorder links in your site header and footer
• General — update your site title, description, timezone, and language
• Integrations — connect third-party services (e.g. Zapier, Slack, Unsplash)

Deleting Your Site

Deleting a Ghost site is permanent — all posts, settings, members, and data are removed and cannot be recovered.

1. Go to the portal → Ghost Site
2. Scroll to the Danger Zone section and expand Delete this site…
3. Type your exact subdomain name to confirm
4. Click Delete Site Permanently

After deletion you can create a new site, but you can pick a different subdomain.

Troubleshooting

Site shows "provisioning" for more than a minute

The cluster may be pulling the Ghost image for the first time. Wait another minute and refresh the portal. If it stays stuck, contact support.

I forgot to set my admin password and the setup page is gone

This means another visit (possibly automated) already created an account. Contact an administrator to reset or delete and recreate your site.

Ghost admin panel returns a 404 or blank page

Make sure you are visiting https://yoursite.electricmonk.io/ghost/ (with the trailing slash). Without it some reverse-proxy configurations return a 404.

My posts aren't appearing on the Fediverse

ActivityPub federation can take a few minutes to propagate. Ensure your post is set to Public visibility — Members-only posts are not federated.