Modern Macro Website

A custom Ghost theme for the publication's public site, on a four-tier subscription ladder

OwnedLive2026

Ghost · Handlebars · CSS

What it is

The public site for Modern Macro Technologies, a macro research publication I own. It reads the economy from the plumbing: fiscal flows, Federal Reserve and Treasury operations, balance-sheet mechanics. The register is deliberately descriptive, never political. AppliedMMT is its flagship publication and stays in use under the company name, which meant the rebuild had to carry an existing readership across without making them feel displaced.

The Modern Macro Technologies homepage: the headline 'The economy runs on flows. We track them' beside a Treasury flow diagram. — The homepage. The warm paper ground, the single rationed blue, and every figure set in mono all come from one token set, which the dark theme re-tunes value by value.

What it does

It carries the publication and its subscription ladder: a free tier, Individual at $129 a month for the newsletter, archive and Discord, Professional at $1,299 for the models, dashboards and analyst Q&A, and Institutional, scoped per firm. Institutional is deliberately not a checkout tier. Every institutional call to action is an email address, because multi-seat work is a conversation. Existing post URLs do not move: posts keep their top-level permalinks and the archive is paginated underneath them, so nothing a reader bookmarked or a search engine indexed breaks.

A homepage section setting out the three-part framework — market updates, deep dives and models, dashboards and tools — above recent research headlines. — The framework section, which is where the subscription ladder is argued and not merely priced.

How it's built

A hand-written Ghost theme: Handlebars templates and hand-written CSS with no build step, edited in place and served directly. Membership, gating and payment run through Ghost members and Stripe. One token set drives full light and dark parity, with the dark values hand-tuned against their own ground rather than derived by inversion. Three self-hosted typefaces do three separate jobs: a news serif for claims the publication stands behind, Public Sans (the typeface of the US Web Design System) for the interface, and IBM Plex Mono for every measured figure.

Working with Claude

The most useful stretch was unglamorous: walking the color tokens one at a time and measuring each against the surface it actually sits on, in both themes. That turned up a token doing two jobs at once, quiet text and control borders, and failing both thresholds; it is why the email field had a border at 1.75:1 against its own background that nobody could see. The fix was a second token rather than a compromise value. The same pass caught that the site had never actually rendered in its intended serif on most machines. It had been falling back to Georgia with a system interface font, which is a browser default, not a design.