I apologise for the confusion guys, this site wasn't really intended with you in mind as the target audience. I believe there was another direct link to the Kickstarter campaign which would have been more appropriate for HN. The marketing site is simply a "pretty thing" to attract some interest from consumers / casual users. Not intended as full demonstration or marketed at developers. I'll post myself when there's something you guys will actually be interested in (aka a GitHub link with a public repo in it).
And yes "impatient in Manhatten" - that can be arranged, bro.
I really, really like this. The decision to use Kickstarter might upset some, but I think it's a pragmatic way of ensuring that talent can focus on it to actually deliver a project to users.
Still, I really hope to see a lot of activity pop-up on GitHub. Community is a bug reason WordPress won over everyone else and while I'm a big fan of opinionated software leadership, I also hope to see more people bring their ideas to the table.
This is a niche for sure, but a niche I happily backed, in part because this looks like something I would really like to use.
The decision to use Node is interesting. Another reason WordPress was so successful is because basically anyone with shared hosting could install it without having to use anything more than an FTP client (and now basically every host has a 1-click install). I'm curious as to the impact this might have on adoption beyond the hosted platform for its targeted user base.
Regardless, I backed and I hope to see this sort of thing succeed, if only because we need more stuff like this in the wild.
(I hope this doesn't sound like I'm being negative, I'm just thinking out loud)
The video specifically mentions being targeted at users, not developers and taking a look at the kickstarter page, this feels less like an open source project and more like a startup that plans to open source it's core software.
There's certainly a focus on selling it as a complete, ready to go package, tightly wrapped and best served with their hosting service, with the people living inside the ecosystem (Users, themers, etc) being the first class citizen here. It almost feels closer to Tumblr (minus social) than Wordpress.
Even the "How does it work?" section seems to be written for someone who will build themes and plugins, specifically mentioning what the MIT licence means for theme developers.
I'm really interested to see how this plays out, and if successful what the community will look like. It feels like a pretty unique setup. Or maybe I'm reading into it too much. : )
I think it's rather sad when a project says they're open source, then says things like :
"You'll need hosting for your blog no matter what, but our service will be the most powerful way of running Ghost - and the easiest to get started with. You'll have the full Ghost software with all bells, whistles, themes, plugins, and some extras that are only available with us (like automatic updates and backups)."
So they won't be open sourcing it then if they're planning on not allowing people to add these features to the main code base?
No repo's because it's not released yet, it's a kickstarter.
re: tiny github image link, the video does specifically mention it's a project targeted at users, not developers, so I guess having things like that as a footnote make sense. Can't comment on how this strategy will work out, guess we'll see.
Yeah, it took quite long to notice that it was kickstarter ad. Although there is something done if you believe actual kickstarter page.
Also, whole point of first paragraph in the site is to promote that app is open source and what benefits it brings to the users. So using open source for marketing and then kind of hiding actual source.. not nice.
I don't think that's what they're saying at all. I think they're saying there are some features that are going to work best on an integrated hosting platform, just by their nature
That would require the person doing the kickstarter to commit time to the project. I get the impression from most of these software-development kickstarters that the goal is to get payment in advance of the dev work.
"Product simulations are prohibited. Projects cannot simulate events to demonstrate what a product might do in the future. Products can only be shown performing actions that they’re able to perform in their current state of development."
And this makes sense in light of true software development: 10% of the time is spent building the rough prototype and 90% of the time is spent refining. And oftentimes the development money is useful for the tedium like tests and validation,.
Go ahead - type in some markdown, then edit the page. You'll be presented with a two-pane view. Your markdown is rendered dynamically. When you're done, just choose the access level for the page (public/private) and you're good to go.
I like the idea of an easy-to-use blogging platform, but I'm not completely sold on the use of markdown.
I'd rather see another syntax language that allowed me a few more controls, like the ability to add classes to elements in case I wanted to switch up styles a bit (maybe I don't want all blockquotes to look the same, or all lists, etc).
It looks good and the execution seems to be well done. What I would really like to see a blogging platform that has a different take on article creation than textarea + publishing.
Blog publishing is also about research, collecting the content and iterating on the article's content until one feels satisfied with the result.
The Ghost design looks very polished. A shame to see the good efforts buried under marketing missteps.
The side-by-side authoring and editing is something I think a lot of folks are doing now in their personal blogs. For mine, I just used plain HTML rather than Markdown [1]. I wanted total control of the resulting markup. Beware, most people hate the background. Just fair warning.
The hard part for me was doing some trickery to scroll to and highlight the current paragraph in the live preview panel. I ended up inserting a "cursor" span that I locate in the preview panel and then scroll to that, find its containing block container, and add a class to that container [2].
I would hope it's done in JavaScript. And, based on the image uploading stuff, (you type something like `!image` and the preview adds in a drag-n-drop spot for an image), it looks like it.
If you're going to be a non-profit, wouldn't it be better to establish the non-profit and then do a fundraising drive? Assuming it's a tax-deductible non-profit, you have an additional benefit to the donation.
And yes "impatient in Manhatten" - that can be arranged, bro.