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?"
>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.
Hmm, not only that, but it was in the frigging demo as shown for the Kickstarter. With all the extra money you'd think at least they'd get the basics right...
I backed the project too and I was also disappointed by the lack of statistics functionality.
But I've recently tried to use it for my blog and my scepticism ceased. A lot of things are done right!
The editor itself is responsive and works on a wide selection of screen sizes (I've used it successfully on android phone).
The markdown preview is actually an interactive UI. When you put an image markup without the link to the actual file there is a placeholder in the preview and you can just drag and drop an image to fill it. The image gets uploaded to your server and everything just works (I've tried it on my phone too).
All these things together make blogging much more fun and frictionless process.
Not a bad start in the end!
I also like the fact there is already some decent themes for the engine. I personally use Ghostium that tries to look like Medium and uses all the web standards suitable for the task. You can see it in action on my blog http://nikdudnik.com
> 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).
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.
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.
I've built a medium.com-like experience for blogging newbies (http://www.postagon.com) and I can tell you that people do indeed pay for it. I think Ghost just needs some time to find its identity between all the different options and target groups.
Ghost can be freely hosted on Red Hat OpenShift. There's even a quickstart installation that gives you node+mySQL and an optional load balancer in 2 clicks and 2 lines in a terminal.
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.
It's one of the mentalities you'll find in that space. Not all consumers are price-sensitive to $5, and the ones who aren't are probably the ones you want more anyway.
regardless if they're trying to make a go of it as a business, the mental model inside the users mind is going to be "They're going to take the first $60 of adwords revenue before I get a penny, that isn't cool".
Only a microscopic minority of bloggers blog to acquire billable hours.
Hobbyists are pretty cool paying "magazine subscription rates" as a household budgetary line item. All the spouse hears is "I'm gonna spend $30 on my hobby blah blah blah" and that goes by a lot easier than $60.
While I think halfing the price might be a little too much (for starting out), I think selling a year for 39.99 would probably be viable. Charging much less than 5 as a minimum payment doesn't sound very sustainable wrt expected churn, payment problems etc. I may very well be completely wrong, though.
Also, don't ignore the value of "choosing" the best customers -- those willing to pay, and willing to dedicate some resources (exemplified by paying a premium). If you build a good "community" of users, they will affect new users later -- by being an initial majority.
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.
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.
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.
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?"