8 ms·

Open-source blogging platform Ghost begins rolling out its fully-hosted service

51 points by potshot 13y ago

speakme 13y ago
What does Ghost offer that can't be accomplished on Medium?
- jaryd 13y ago
  For starters, it's open source! https://github.com/tryghost/Ghost https://github.com/tryghost/Ghost
  - speakme 13y ago
    That's a good start! I guess I wonder how much the uptake will be for a broader audience who can get WP for free and may not care as much about the customization experience.
    - dkuntz2 13y ago
      The biggest problem with that is a huge portion of the WP audience is using whatever cheap shared hosting they can find, which is great for WP, because PHP and MySQL are ubiquitous when it comes to shared hosts, but Node (which is what Ghost uses) isn't. Using Node, while something the developers probably liked, might not have been the best decision because it severely hinders adoption by the casual users that WP currently owns.
- thecoffman 13y ago
  For one, you don't need to sign in with Twitter or Facebook... that's a huge advantage right away! Its also open source, which is a giant win.
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  Like jaryd said, it's open source, which makes the biggest difference: Ghost can be hosted on your own server where Medium can only be used on Medium's servers. Which is a huge deal for some people (myself included). I don't really trust other services to remain around, especially when doing so might put my content at risk. I'd much rather be in control of where my content's hosted, even if it means I need do some of the more fidly management and setup things.
- minimaxir 13y ago
  Personal branding.
- Nekorosu 13y ago
  The cozy sense of ownership 'cause it's open source and not proprietary.
jmathai 13y ago
Before I make a comment I wanted to say I think Ghost is an awesome initiative and hope that it furthers what's already been accomplished by Wordpress. That being said, I was a bit bummed to see it as a pay only option. I get it, you have to pay bills. Seriously, I get it - we just ditched our consumer product due to this fact. $5/month is more than I'm willing to pay to try it out. And in reality, it's too much for me to pay even if I like it. That keeps me from trying it out and falling in love with it. You know what I would pay $5/month for? A blog for my business. But I'll end up installing or signing up on Wordpress because I'm familiar with it. Because I was able to use it for free. This mentality sucks, I know. Welcome to the consumer Internet. Edit: I'm not suggesting that they offer a free plan. I wouldn't. I hope they focus sooner than later off the consumer market.
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  You could still pay that $5/month; just get a cheap VPS or other host that supports Node.js, and run Ghost yourself. I think Digital Ocean (which has a $5/month plan) has a really simple Ghost installer.
- spindritf 13y ago
  $5/month is more than I'm willing to pay to try it out. First month is free.
  - jmathai 13y ago
    Right. But $5/month is more than I'd be willing to pay for a personal blog. That keeps me from investing time to try it out for other uses I'd be more willing to pay $5/month for.
    - girasquid 13y ago
      How many billable hours would it take to make the $60/year this will cost you?
      - jmathai 13y ago
sergiotapia 13y ago
I'm using Ghost to host my blog: http://www.sergiotapia.me/ http://www.sergiotapia.me/ CPanel has a great 1 click installer. It just works out of the box. Things I like about it are markdown support, and... that's pretty much it. I'm kind of underwhelmed by it. No comment system, I had to tack Disqus on to the handlebars template file. No statistics? It's a planned feature, but I feel like this should have been like priority one. Bloggers like to see that people are reading their material. Slow despite being so light in features. This one suprised me; the page is so miniscule in feature that I wonder why it's taking so long to render blog pages. No syntax highlighting built into the markdown for code support. :( I feel like Ghost has tremendous potential but it's just underwhelming in it's current state. It's landing page marketing is fantastic, hell it got me to use it, but once I had it I was like: "is this it?"
- spindritf 13y ago
  It's an MVP currently. They built the smallest possible number of features to make it work. I think it's great. They'll have real feedback to work with and I can get it on ground floor.
  - markdown 13y ago
    Took a heck of a long time for an org with access to shitloads of cash and cream-of-the-crop developers to release such a basic "MVP".
  - coldtea 13y ago
    People create same "MVP" blogging systems for free, in less than a month, from their home and with no funding. For Node too -- or even with more difficult to work with technologies.
- e12e 13y ago
  > Slow despite being so light in features. This one suprised me; the page is so miniscule in feature that I wonder why it's taking so long to render blog pages. I agree, your blog is indeed slow to load. I'd guess putting varnish (or any caching proxy) in front of node would fix that, though -- have you tried? Looks too me like the really slow part is loading assets -- are css files generated on each request? Or is there some simple tuning that can/should be done on the node server? I'm assuming you've deployed as "production" (as per the ghost docs)? The other "obvious" thing to do is throw nginx in front, and run static assets via that (or any normal web server, really) -- but even node shouldn't be that slow assuming you have pretty low traffic? Note, no affiliation with ghost or node -- but also a little surprised that such a simple site is as slow as it is. It's like the old wordpress (that seemingly was designed to benchmark how quickly mysql was able to do as many sequential, separate selects for a single page view as possible. AFAIK wp still does a bit of this, but the problem has been fixed by some semi-sane caching).
ganessh 13y ago
Octopress is more fun :) No offense

51 points by potshot 13y ago

speakme 13y ago

What does Ghost offer that can't be accomplished on Medium?

jaryd 13y ago
For starters, it's open source! https://github.com/tryghost/Ghost https://github.com/tryghost/Ghost
- speakme 13y ago
  That's a good start! I guess I wonder how much the uptake will be for a broader audience who can get WP for free and may not care as much about the customization experience.
  - dkuntz2 13y ago
    The biggest problem with that is a huge portion of the WP audience is using whatever cheap shared hosting they can find, which is great for WP, because PHP and MySQL are ubiquitous when it comes to shared hosts, but Node (which is what Ghost uses) isn't. Using Node, while something the developers probably liked, might not have been the best decision because it severely hinders adoption by the casual users that WP currently owns.
thecoffman 13y ago
For one, you don't need to sign in with Twitter or Facebook... that's a huge advantage right away! Its also open source, which is a giant win.
dkuntz2 13y ago
Like jaryd said, it's open source, which makes the biggest difference: Ghost can be hosted on your own server where Medium can only be used on Medium's servers. Which is a huge deal for some people (myself included). I don't really trust other services to remain around, especially when doing so might put my content at risk. I'd much rather be in control of where my content's hosted, even if it means I need do some of the more fidly management and setup things.
minimaxir 13y ago
Personal branding.
Nekorosu 13y ago
The cozy sense of ownership 'cause it's open source and not proprietary.

jmathai 13y ago

Before I make a comment I wanted to say I think Ghost is an awesome initiative and hope that it furthers what's already been accomplished by Wordpress. That being said, I was a bit bummed to see it as a pay only option. I get it, you have to pay bills. Seriously, I get it - we just ditched our consumer product due to this fact. $5/month is more than I'm willing to pay to try it out. And in reality, it's too much for me to pay even if I like it. That keeps me from trying it out and falling in love with it. You know what I would pay $5/month for? A blog for my business. But I'll end up installing or signing up on Wordpress because I'm familiar with it. Because I was able to use it for free. This mentality sucks, I know. Welcome to the consumer Internet. Edit: I'm not suggesting that they offer a free plan. I wouldn't. I hope they focus sooner than later off the consumer market.

dkuntz2 13y ago
You could still pay that $5/month; just get a cheap VPS or other host that supports Node.js, and run Ghost yourself. I think Digital Ocean (which has a $5/month plan) has a really simple Ghost installer.
spindritf 13y ago
$5/month is more than I'm willing to pay to try it out. First month is free.
- jmathai 13y ago
  Right. But $5/month is more than I'd be willing to pay for a personal blog. That keeps me from investing time to try it out for other uses I'd be more willing to pay $5/month for.
  - girasquid 13y ago
    How many billable hours would it take to make the $60/year this will cost you?
    - jmathai 13y ago

sergiotapia 13y ago

I'm using Ghost to host my blog: http://www.sergiotapia.me/ http://www.sergiotapia.me/ CPanel has a great 1 click installer. It just works out of the box. Things I like about it are markdown support, and... that's pretty much it. I'm kind of underwhelmed by it. No comment system, I had to tack Disqus on to the handlebars template file. No statistics? It's a planned feature, but I feel like this should have been like priority one. Bloggers like to see that people are reading their material. Slow despite being so light in features. This one suprised me; the page is so miniscule in feature that I wonder why it's taking so long to render blog pages. No syntax highlighting built into the markdown for code support. :( I feel like Ghost has tremendous potential but it's just underwhelming in it's current state. It's landing page marketing is fantastic, hell it got me to use it, but once I had it I was like: "is this it?"

spindritf 13y ago
It's an MVP currently. They built the smallest possible number of features to make it work. I think it's great. They'll have real feedback to work with and I can get it on ground floor.
- markdown 13y ago
  Took a heck of a long time for an org with access to shitloads of cash and cream-of-the-crop developers to release such a basic "MVP".
- coldtea 13y ago
  People create same "MVP" blogging systems for free, in less than a month, from their home and with no funding. For Node too -- or even with more difficult to work with technologies.
e12e 13y ago
> Slow despite being so light in features. This one suprised me; the page is so miniscule in feature that I wonder why it's taking so long to render blog pages. I agree, your blog is indeed slow to load. I'd guess putting varnish (or any caching proxy) in front of node would fix that, though -- have you tried? Looks too me like the really slow part is loading assets -- are css files generated on each request? Or is there some simple tuning that can/should be done on the node server? I'm assuming you've deployed as "production" (as per the ghost docs)? The other "obvious" thing to do is throw nginx in front, and run static assets via that (or any normal web server, really) -- but even node shouldn't be that slow assuming you have pretty low traffic? Note, no affiliation with ghost or node -- but also a little surprised that such a simple site is as slow as it is. It's like the old wordpress (that seemingly was designed to benchmark how quickly mysql was able to do as many sequential, separate selects for a single page view as possible. AFAIK wp still does a bit of this, but the problem has been fixed by some semi-sane caching).

ganessh 13y ago

Octopress is more fun :) No offense