How to publish here

Ghost will happily publish something half-tagged. The theme is what notices. Almost everything below is a consequence of that one fact.

The eight things you publish

Everything except Footnotes is a Ghost post or page. Footnotes never touches Ghost — entries appear the moment you save them in the admin tool, with no publish step. And there are no custom theme settings anywhere in Ghost admin: the whole authoring surface is the body, the tags, the excerpt, the feature image and the post's meta fields.

What each type needs

Whose words are whose

Their words in Instrument Serif italic. Your words in the body sans. It holds on job posts, quoted passages and Footnotes, and it is the whole reason a reader can tell a company's language from yours without you having to say so.

Setting the body

An issue runs on three columns: a sticky contents rail on the left, the body in the middle at 562px, and a notes margin on the right. Below the breakpoint the rail collapses and the notes move to the end. Everything here was settled against a real issue, so the answer to "how do I mark this up" already exists — you are choosing from a set, not inventing.

Most of this is plain Ghost. The chip on each device says how it's authored: a green chip means you use the editor's own feature — or type the thing — and the theme styles it; a grey chip means an HTML card, and every one of those is saved as a Ghost snippet so it's a pick, not a paste.

…acquire Contentful, m3ter,<sup><a href="#note-1" data-note-ref="1">1</a></sup> and the big one, Fin.

<!-- one HTML card at the end of the body -->
<ol class="sh-notes">
  <li id="note-1">Which I had genuinely never heard of before this.</li>
  <li id="note-2">The second note.</li>
</ol>

<blockquote class="sh-pull"><p>The line, in my own voice, turned up.</p></blockquote>

…the number they reported <mark>was never the number at all</mark>.

<blockquote class="sh-pull sh-pull--marked"><p>The line to screenshot.</p></blockquote>

<ul class="sh-list-short"> … </ul>

<div class="sh-video__facade" role="button" tabindex="0"
     data-platform="tiktok" data-url="https://www.tiktok.com/@handle/video/…">
  <div class="sh-video__facade-head"><span>TikTok</span><span>@handle</span></div>
  <div class="sh-video__facade-body">
    <span class="sh-video__facade-play" aria-hidden="true"></span>
    <span class="sh-video__facade-cta">Play video</span>
    <span class="sh-video__facade-note">Playing loads TikTok's player, which sets
      their cookies. Nothing loads until you do.</span>
  </div>
</div>

<div class="sh-video-removed">
  <span class="sh-video-removed__chip">Video removed</span>
  <p class="sh-video-removed__line">At eleven seconds he says the policy is
     unlimited, and that every request last quarter was denied.</p>
  <p class="sh-video-removed__meta">@handle · TikTok · taken down since publication</p>
</div>

<div class="sh-events">
  <div class="sh-event">
    <p class="sh-event__when">JUL 13–14<br><span>NYC, NY</span></p>
    <div class="sh-event__main">
      <p class="sh-event__title">Event title</p>
      <p class="sh-event__host">Hosted by <a href="…">Host</a>. <a href="…">Register →</a></p>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

<time datetime="2026-09-30">30 September</time> – <time datetime="2026-10-02">2 October 2026</time>

Unique to each type

Everything above still applies; these pull out the elements that belong to one post type only, because that is exactly what gets buried. If a page comes out wrong, check its sheet first.

Never write

The support ask

All of it is free. None of it is free to make.

Reader's benefit first, ask second. A fact rather than a plea, and it never implies anything is being withheld. Reword it if a particular page needs it — don't reinvent the shape.

Asks in order: Subscribe (if you want to), then Become a Support(ing) Human — the tier's name, never "become a member" — then Buy me a coffee. A fundraiser is a line of text, never a button. Every support block closes on this, or something with the same shape:

Support if you can, don’t worry about it if you can’t. Support Human is for you either way.

It removes the obligation instead of softening it. Do not replace it with anything that ranks the options, says what a tier unlocks, or thanks the reader in advance. Nothing is locked, so nothing can be unlocked — including by a fundraiser. One exemption: the sign-off sentence in the email is your own line and runs coffee before Support(ing) Human. That order is settled there and nowhere else. Fundraisers run two weeks with a stated end date, show a ledger and never a thermometer, and say plainly that falling short is fine.

When something is missing

If you are hand-writing HTML inside a post, two house rules follow you in: text at or below 13px is never lighter than #6b6b6b on paper, #3a3a3a on a section tint or #b8b6b4 on the near-black ground, and never smaller than 10px; and accent color is not for body text. Decorative marks are exempt — twinkles, oversized numerals, the Footnotes dagger †.

The four tools

Before you hit publish

Settled by the build

The seven questions this page carried while the theme was being built, each answered from the templates that actually run — kept here so the answer is findable where the question used to be.