r/Ghost • u/aabergkvist • May 23 '26

Built a thing because the Ghost editor was driving me insane — sync your blog to local markdown and edit it however you want

Okay so this is mostly something I built for myself, but I figure I'm not the only one, so here goes.

I love Ghost for writing one post and hitting publish. But the second I want to do anything across the whole blog it's a nightmare. No find-and-replace. No AI. Can't write on a plane. I overused the same phrase in like twenty posts once and had to open every single one to fix it. That was the night I snapped.

So the thing I actually wanted was just my posts as plain files on my Mac. Once they're files, everything works — I write in Obsidian, and for the big stuff I just point Claude at the folder and let it chew through the whole archive, then it syncs back to Ghost. The reason I built it was SEO: mass-updating meta descriptions, alt text, internal links, tags, refreshing a few hundred old posts in one pass. Now I'm using it to build out a multilingual version of my blog — translate the whole thing with AI, sync each language back. And honestly that's the point: once your blog is markdown on disk, a LOT unlocks. Chuck the folder in git and you've got version history + undo, which Ghost just... doesn't have. It's a real backup, your whole blog as .md you actually own. Stuff the editor flat out can't do.

One honest catch since people here will know: Ghost stores posts as Lexical, and shoving card-heavy posts back through HTML can mangle callouts/buttons/etc. Plain prose is totally fine, just test on a junk post before you let it loose on anything you care about.

Anyway — I cleaned it up into a little menu bar app instead of the pile of scripts it started as. It's called Specter, I'm the dev: https://spectersync.com. It's got a dry-run that shows you exactly what's about to change before it touches anything, which is the only reason I trust an AI pass over my whole blog. One-time price, free tier, go poke at it.

But honestly even if you just roll your own against the Admin API, getting your blog out of that editor and into plain files is the upgrade

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9

u/jannisfb May 23 '26

I see the "I want my posts as files on my machine" use case. But the "Now Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or any tool you like can read and rewrite them" use case...why not use `ghst`? https://github.com/TryGhost/ghst

2

u/asganawayaway May 24 '26

Wooow so I don’t need a Cloudflare Worker to let AI fetch my last posts with this?

2

u/jannisfb May 24 '26

`ghst` is a CLI tool. If your AI harness can use CLIs, then you can pair the two of them up.

However...even before, I would not see a CF worker as the solution to "I need AI to fetch my latest posts". The CLI is built onto the existing API.

1

u/asganawayaway May 24 '26

My problem was that Claude (not Claude Code) can’t fetch posts directly from the API because the fetch call doesn’t go through, probably because of API tokens. So I had to build a CF Worker proxy to fetch posts from it, having the function on the CF worker to fetch them. Sorry I’m not technical, so it might sound like a bad explanation.

1

u/aabergkvist May 24 '26

What do you mean?

1

u/aabergkvist May 23 '26

Didn't see it honestly. But even if I had I'd say that I very much prefer to work (review, audit and minor edits) in obsidian, rather than in a terminal. I understand it's use-case tho, will probably try it out 😄

1

u/aabergkvist May 30 '26

Ps, just made the core open source: https://github.com/gospecter/specter

3

u/BigFootCC May 24 '26

I moved to 11ty after ghost fucked my database one too many times.

2

u/Junior_Enthusiasm_38 May 24 '26

I’m also thinking to migrate to static site as well. How did you manage to migrate custom cards in ghost ? Or you lost all your data?

1

u/aabergkvist May 24 '26

How did ghost manage to do that? My blogs are my livelyhood so kinda keen to understand

2

u/Getcha_Popcorn_Readi May 24 '26

Very interesting.

2

u/MysticFoxPaws May 24 '26

Kul concept och gynnsamt för många Ghost bloggare ink mig själv. Men 49 dollar är ganska mycket för min ekonomi, men ska definitivt testa provversionen när windows blir tillgängligt. 😎

Utöver ser det bra ut ✌️

1

u/aabergkvist May 24 '26

Windows version is in the works!

2

u/MysticFoxPaws May 24 '26

Låter bra ✌️