Technodabbler is Moving
After 13 years of self-hosting, Technodabbler moved to Magic Pages after spam signups turned Ghost maintenance into the wrong kind of project.
Or rather, Technodabbler moved last week, along with its French counterpart, Technocurieux.
I have been self-hosting Technodabbler for 13 years, going all the way back to the early days of Ghost, the software that runs Technodabbler. Before that, I ran a mix of WordPress blogs and static websites. Self-hosting has always been part of the Technodabbler story. It gave me control, taught me a lot, and fit the spirit of figuring things out by doing them.
Alex Denault
Recently, however, I started noticing more newsletter signups on both sites. That was especially suspicious on Technocurieux, which gets much less traffic. The domains also looked wrong. Many had little to do with technology, and I was seeing fewer Gmail addresses than I would expect from normal readers. Something was up.
After some research, I found that spam signups are a known problem for Ghost sites. There is a useful discussion about it in the Ghost forums, along with an excellent write-up by Curiositry that helped explain what was actually happening.
Curiositry
Curiositry wrote an excellent pieces on how malicious parties can weaponize blogs.
The short version is that Ghost blogs are not always the main target. They can become ammunition. When someone wants to flood an inbox, often to hide account activity, fraud alerts, or other important messages, they can sign that email address up to thousands of newsletters at once. The result is a wave of unwanted confirmation emails sent by legitimate sites.
That explanation matched what I was seeing. The same kinds of signups were appearing on both Technodabbler and Technocurieux, often close together. It was not reader growth. Issues like this are the same reason I eventually stopped hosting my own email server. The problem was not that spam prevention was impossible, but that it would become an ongoing maintenance fight, and that is not where I want to spend my time.
Magic Pages is a reliable and affordable hosting platform.
That is why I moved both sites to Magic Pages, an affordable Ghost hosting platform run by Jannis, a long-time and active member of the Ghost community. If you have spent time in the Ghost forums or the Ghost subreddit, you have probably seen him helping people work through technical issues. With his help, migrating both blogs took less than a day. For readers, very little changes. For me, it removes one more infrastructure problem from the stack and puts that time back into the blogs, while supporting an important contributor to the Ghost blog ecosystem.
After 13 years, I am still glad I self-hosted for as long as I did. I learned a lot from it. But at some point, the practical choice is to let someone else handle the infrastructure so the work can keep moving. In this case, that feels like the right trade.
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