Hey 99.999% of the 10 people who visit this site - trust me, you can skip this one. You'll want to skip this one. I'm trying to do some work under the hood of the site, and I'm not tech or code proficient. Luckily, the folks at Ghost are really helpful. Instead of sending them an email, I thought I'd try working through it here in a post. In theory, then, if someone on the interwebs has a similar question, maybe they stumble onto this and it helps them.

Background

Years ago I started a poorly defined little exercise in media literacy. Long story short - I'm convinced that we all have the tools necessary to identify misinformation, bad information, and incomplete information without outsourcing the responsibility to big tech or the government. Because that'd be a really bad idea. (Timely post. Twitter just suspended DT's account. While I understand the impulse to stop someone shouting "fire" in a theater, I think we're better off focusing on media literacy and critical thinking vs. censorship.)

Anyways, I've bounced back and forth between having that feature - Consuming Journalism - here and at Substack. I think in general it's best to have one site as long as you can avoid having a confusing site.

There are a lot of ways to do that in Ghost. I currently have a partial solution through tags. I have a tag for Consuming Journalism; clicking on it will bring up all the posts that share that tag. But I think I would like to give it its own page (or collection) so I can keep the posts off the main page. Why? It's a side gig, and I don't post to it consistently. I'm really just hoping Finland's media literacy program stumbles on it, thinks I'm a genius, and offers me a job in Helsinki. Seriously.

Ghost puts a lot of effort into its tutorials. I am so low on the tech ladder that they usually are a little over my head, but that's my fault. I think this is the relevant guide:

Building content collections with Ghost

I think I understand the basic concept, but I'm not sure about the execution.

I added Consuming Journalism lines to the collections section but then figured I should ask for assistance before breaking something.

My main collection is the default that came with the Lyra theme. As far as I know, anything I post, regardless of the presence or absence of tags, goes to my primary page, which I think in my case is synonymous with index and blog.

This is where I got confused.

I would like to be able to write a Consuming Journalism post and sent it only to the Consuming Journalism collection, without it showing on my main page. I'd like to also be able to add tags that I use on my main page.

I would also (lots of alsos) like to be able to include the Consuming Journalism tag on posts that do go on my main page. It's rare, but there are times that a regular blog post will have enough media literacy content that I would like for the post to show up on the main page and in the Consuming Journalism collection.

It looks like I am trying to figure out how to do the following:

Route to Index

Route to Consuming Journalism collection

Route to Index and Consuming Journalism

Route to Index or Consuming Journalism without worrying about which tags are used

I think that's a decent overview of what I'm trying to do, but my specific questions probably aren't clear. (We should all pause and acknowledge that tech support is a very difficult job. It's never easy trying to decipher a customer's question or objectives.)