[sergiotapia]

I'm using Ghost to host my blog: 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?"

[coldtea]

>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...

[Nekorosu]

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

[e12e]

> 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).

[madsushi]

I like the idea, but it was the Dashboard (and stats) on their landing page that sold me, and sadly that feature is not even in the build yet.

[spindritf]

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]

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]

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.