Connect Specter to your Ghost blog (first sync)

Specter connects to your Ghost blog in the browser and brings every post into one workspace as clean, editable content — there’s nothing to install. This guide walks through connecting Specter to Ghost and running your first sync, which pulls your existing posts in so you can browse them, run AI recipes across the archive, and publish reviewed changes back. Subscribe now and your workspace opens with 500 free credits.

Before you start

You need one thing in place:

A Ghost Admin API key. This is what lets Specter read and write your posts. It looks like id:secret and is not the same as the Content API key. If you don’t have it yet, here’s how to get your Ghost Admin API key.

Open your workspace at app.spectersync.com and start a new Ghost connection.

Step 1: Paste your site URL and Admin API key

The connection screen asks for two values:

Your Ghost site URL — the full address of your blog, such as https://yourblog.com.
Your Admin API key in the id:secret format you copied from Ghost.

Step 2: Test the connection

Click Test Connection. Specter uses your URL and key to make a quick authenticated call to your Ghost Admin API and confirm everything checks out. A green result means you’re good to continue. If it fails, jump to the troubleshooting note at the bottom of this page — it’s almost always the wrong key type or a typo in the URL.

Step 3: Run your first sync (pull)

With the connection verified, Specter runs a first sync. This is a pull: it reads your existing Ghost posts and brings each one into your workspace. Depending on how many posts you have, this takes a few seconds to a minute.

Before anything is committed, you can use the dry-run preview. A dry run shows exactly what the sync will create, update, or flag, without changing a thing — handy the first time so you know what to expect. Browsing and previewing are free.

What appears in your workspace

After the pull finishes, every post is editable content with a metadata block carrying:

title — the post title
tags — your Ghost tags
status — draft or published
the feature image URL
the custom excerpt

The body of each post is your content as clean prose. Edit a post by hand, or run an AI recipe across the whole archive, and Specter publishes the reviewed changes back to Ghost.

A note on scope: Specter syncs posts only. It does not pull or push images, themes, members, or newsletters. Feature images come through as URLs, not as downloaded files. And because Ghost stores posts in its Lexical format rather than markdown, what you edit is a faithful projection of each post, not a lossy export — see how Specter handles Ghost cards.

How Specter protects your work

Two-way sync means changes can collide. Specter guards against that with conflict prompts: if both the Ghost copy and your workspace changed since the last sync, Specter stops and asks you which version to keep rather than silently overwriting either side. Combined with the dry-run diff and a snapshot behind every publish, that means a sync never clobbers your work without telling you first.

Now edit your posts

With your posts in your workspace, the writing workflow is yours to choose. Specter isn’t an AI itself — it’s the workflow layer that runs the model across your site and shows you every change before it ships. A popular setup is editing posts with an AI recipe; see editing Ghost posts with Claude.

Troubleshooting: connection failed

If Test Connection fails, the cause is usually one of two things: you pasted the Content API key instead of the Admin API key, or there’s a typo in your site URL (a missing https://, a trailing slash, or the wrong domain). Double-check both, and if the key looks wrong, walk back through how to get your Ghost Admin API key to copy a fresh one.

That’s the whole connection flow. Paste, test, pull — and your Ghost blog is now a workspace you can edit and review however you like. Subscribe now →

Prefer to run the engine on your own Mac, with your posts as plain .md files on disk and nothing routed through our servers? The desktop and open-source edition walks through installing the app and connecting it locally.