I started a new project, a zine exchange club called Zine Cloud!

Here’s what I did to get started with Discourse.

  1. made a new email address
  2. bought the domain zine.cloud on spaceship.com
  3. set up mail forwarding
  4. spun up a one-click install of Discourse as a DigitalOcean droplet
    • details of the droplet: 4 GB Memory / 2 Intel vCPUs / 70 GB Disk / SFO3 - Discourse on Ubuntu 22.04
  5. added zine.cloud to “domains” in DigitalOcean, and changed to “custom nameservers” on spaceship.com. added the ip address to the A record in DigitalOcean.
  6. signed up for a new brevo.com account for SMTP because it’s free up to 300 mails a day, not just a free trial.
  7. in digitalocean, tried using the web console a lot of times, but it kept crashing
  8. in digitalocean, used the “recovery console”
  9. discourse setup script could not find zine.cloud
  10. waited for dns
  11. signed up for a new maxmind account
  12. discourse setup script worked
  13. wait for discourse to install…
  14. it works! zine.cloud is up! signing up for account…
  15. no email. oh, i have to do dkim/domain auth in brevo and digitalocean dns.
  16. ok, i authenticated my domain! let’s try sending the email again
  17. got it! yay! setting up Discourse…