It turns out that my stint on WordPress was short-lived. One month, to be exact. I’ve restarted my blog on Ghost 6 with all the bells-and-whistles of Federation, built-in membership management, and native analytics from TinyBird.
Design
I’m using a new theme, Thesis*, *from Priority Vision, which reminds very much of a particular three-column Mac app that I’ve worked on. The pièce de résistance: the little satellite icon in the sidebar (from lucide.dev) representing NetNewsWire.
Federation
The website has its own Fediverse persona/mind of its own:
You can join as a member. It’s free. You get the ability to comment and access to some member’s only content (e.g., easy theme installs for NetNewsWire). I might send you the occasional email.
Miscellaneous
Most of the redirect work is done, so WordPress-style URLs (yyyy/mm/<post_title>) should redirect to the new Ghost URL. There’s no JSON feed with Ghost, so you’ll need to resubscribe to the new RSS feed.
NetNewsWire has an experimental branch with work-in-progress Liquid Glass changes. These changes cover the Mac, iPad, and iPhone apps. This post covers changes to the iPad and iPhone app.
iPad
Sidebar
The Sidebar (Feeds view) has had a significant refresh.
What was previously a UITableView is now a UICollectionView. While this gives more flexibility in terms of custom layout, it was a change that was needed in order to adopt modern styling across iPad and iPhone. iPad uses the .sidebar style, and iPhone uses .insetGrouped. This is similar the behaviour you see in Mail.
Modern Sidebar (left), Classic Sidebar (right)
From top-to-bottom, the following modernising changes have been made:
The current *refresh *status is now located in the navigation bar as a subtitle, having previously been the footer
Toolbar buttons follow Liquid Glass standards
Like the Mac refresh, the Feeds view floats and allows Timeline content to slide underneath
Smart Feeds and Account headers now adopt modern secondary styling
Selected feeds have a modern capsule background and the text is **bold **(note: there is little consistency in Apple’s apps—Files makes text bold while Reminders doesn’t)
Folders have been entirely redesigned to match modern standards—they now have the same indentation as any other feed, but the enclosed feeds are indented further
Folders will highlight when Feeds are being dragged and dropped into them
Separators have been removed
Unread counts are larger and are no longer backed by a filled capsule
Unread counts for folders are only displayed when the folder is closed
Swipe actions reveal icons instead of named labels due to space constraints
Users can resize the sidebar (within reason 😃)
When side-by-side, you can see that there are less feeds on screen as the modern cells have larger vertical margins.
Timeline
Modern Timeline (left), Classic Timeline (right)
Again, from top-to-bottom:
Navigation bar images have been removed
Unread counts are now located in the navigation bar subtitle
The search bar has been moved to the app-wide toolbar and behaves similar to the Mac search
The Timeline width is user adjustable (again, within reason 😄)
Timeline cells have been redesigned in Interface builder and now have the rounded corner selection style
The Mark All as Read image (on both iPad and iPhone) has had alignment changes to make sure it sits in the middle of an englassified button
Articles
Modern Article (left), Classic Article (right)
There aren’t many changes to the Article view:
Articles can be read in three-pane view without hiding the Sidebar
The top toolbar inherits search capabilities
The bottom toolbar buttons have been grouped in a 2-1-2 formation with the *Next Unread *button sitting in the throne seat
iPhone
Sidebar
Similar to the iPad, the iPhone *Feeds view *has had a significant lick of paint.
Modern Feeds (left), Classic Feeds (right)
As mentioned above, the overall design adopts an .insetGrouped style. Comparatively:
Inline navigation titles are used
The latest refresh status has moved to the navigation bar subtitle from the bottom toolbar
Smart Feeds and Account headers now adopt modern styling
Disclosure indicators have moved from left to right
Similar to the iPad updates:
Folders will highlight when Feeds are being dragged and dropped into them
Unread counts are larger and are no longer backed by a filled capsule
Unread counts for folders are only displayed when the folder is closed
Swipe actions reveal icons instead of named labels due to space constraints
Timeline
Modern Timeline (left), Classic Timeline (right)
Timeline changes on the iPhone are slightly different to those of the iPad:
The navigation bar makes use of the subtitle to display either the current unread count or, if the unread count is zero, the latest refresh time
Images and capsule-backed unread counts have been removes from the navigation bar
The search bar has been moved to the bottom of the screen and is no longer hidden under the navigation bar
Cells have modern rounded corner selection style
Articles
Modern Article (left); Classic Article (right)
There are almost no changes to the iPhone’s Article view other than adopting modern bar and button styling. Phew!
NetNewsWire has an experimental branch with work-in-progress Liquid Glass changes. These changes cover the Mac, iPad, and iPhone apps. This post covers changes on the Mac, which, in comparison to the iPad and iPhone app, are relatively minor.
Sidebar
The Sidebar adopts standard Liquid Glass behaviours which means it floats and allows timeline content to slide underneath.
0:00
/0:05
Unread indicators are no longer backed by a filled capsule. They are now just a simple unread count.
Old (left), New (right)
Toolbar
The Toolbar has seen a minor reorganisation which moves the sidebar toggle from the timeline into the sidebar. In addition, toolbar buttons adopt the standard Liquid Glass button look-and-feel.
NetNewsWire Toolbar
Timeline and Article Views
The Timeline and Article view have seen no changes other than to remove code that is no longer required.
Context Menus
Context Menus have been updated with icons where appropriate.
Old (left), new (right)
About NetNewsWire
Lastly, the About NetNewsWire panel has been modernised in full:
A quick follow-up to yesterday’s post about the issues I faced getting Ghost’s ActivityPub—Network—functionality up and running: I’m now trying with Ghost(Pro) on my normal domain, and I’m still running into problems.
This time, the issue is slightly different: Network is enabled in Ghost’s settings, but when I open the Network tab I get an “Account suspended” warning. Looking in the Web Inspector, I see a host of 403 errors in the console, and using RapidAPI I get the following error:
{"error":"Forbidden","code":"SITE_MISSING"}
My current theory is that this is happening because my site was previously hosted on WordPress, which had ActivityPub enabled. If that’s the case, this could be an issue for anyone migrating between platforms.
Here’s hoping Ghost support can sort this out next week.
using self-hosted and Ghost’s own ActivityPub infrastructure
using a Ghost admin domain at site.tld/ghost and admin.site.tld
proxying and not proxying using Cloudflare
Nothing works.
When using Ghost’s infrastructure, I receive Policy Violation errors. When I use my server’s own ActivityPub service at :8080 I get HTTP 403 errors. It’s a little disappointing.
However, when self-hosting, the native analytics with TinyBird worked as advertised and were really well presented, though not as in-depth as Plausible.
When not self-hosting I tried one of the fresh domains above with Ghost(Pro) and the ActivityPub functionality worked. It was marvellous.
I’m really hoping these issues are just early 6.0 bugs for self-hosters.
Apple seeded the fifth developer beta of iOS 26 today, and while the number of significant changes has dropped, there are quite a few smaller tweaks. Apple is continuing to refine button placement, animations, and design in preparation for launching iOS 26 in September.
Disappointingly, I am still seeing the same issues that I had in betas 3 and 4.
Ghost publications are now connected with an open network. People can discover, follow, like and reply to your posts across Bluesky, Flipboard, Threads, Mastodon, WordPress, Ghost, and any other social web platform. Distribution is now built-in.
We’re introducing a native analytics suite for Ghost, giving you detailed insights into how your content performs across web traffic, newsletters, and member subscriptions – all in real-time, all from the same place you publish everyday.
I am sorely tempted to return to Ghost for these two features and the anti-faff nature of the platform versus (for example) WordPress. What’s keeping me on WordPress is the ability to customise RSS feeds and include a JSON feed. While I was able to do this in the past with Ghost, my customisations that enabled it were removed every time I updated to the latest Ghost version.
Apple today provided developers with the fourth betas of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 for testing purposes, with the updates coming two weeks after Apple seeded the third betas.
I am still left with two bugs on iPad that I can’t get to the bottom of.
Sidebar
The first, above, is a sidebar that doesn’t react to light and dark mode changes, always leaving text looking black. (I’ve registered for trait changes to try and force it to white, but it doesn’t make a difference.)
Swipe Action
The second issue is leading swipe actions where the content of the cell is offset by the size of the sidebar (but only when the sidebar is visible).
NetNewsWire Toolbar
Sidebar
Swipe Action
MacRumors concept (the Orange looks like