Blog­ging Plat­form Ghost Could Start A Revolution

If you’ve been blog­ging for a while, you can un­der­stand the frus­tra­tion of want­ing to make a small edit. Yet, in or­der to make a small edit you have to en­dure the process of go­ing back and forth be­tween the edit screen and the pre­view screen.

What if you could edit your post on the left side of the screen and have the pre­view on the right side of the screen?

Of course, this idea was in­spired by more re­cent e-mail in­ter­faces that in­clude a pre­view read­ing pain. How­ever, It seems as if the Ghost ex­pe­ri­ence en­cour­ages blog­gers to take it one step further.

What’s The Big Deal About Ghost?

It’s not just one big deal, ap­par­ently. You have sev­eral ad­van­tages of us­ing the new Ghost blog­ging platform.

Some of the most im­por­tant ben­e­fits are men­tioned below:

  • As you write your post on the left, you can see the pre­view on the right.
  • You have no but­tons to press while writing.
  • You don’t have to fum­ble around with time-con­­sum­ing HTML markup.
  • It’s ideal for mo­bile blogging.
  • You can ap­ply nu­mer­ous for­mat­ting op­tions much more easily.

It seems nec­es­sar­ily in this world of mo­bile com­put­ing to use Ghost. This new plat­form was de­signed for greater user friend­li­ness on the go. That way, peo­ple can be any­where and (al­most) ac­com­plish what they can on a home computer.

The Real Deal: Test­ing of The Ghost Platform

You don’t have to use any HTML if you don’t want. How­ever, you may want to still if you want to bold items. Re­gard­less, you will still need to know some code. For in­stance, if you want to ital­i­cize with­out us­ing HTML, you need to know that typ­ing text be­tween two as­ter­isk signs (*) is what cre­ates this.

How­ever, you don’t have to worry about putting para­graph or break mark­ers af­ter every block or line of text. Still, you will have to know how to in­clude code to cre­ate links.

Some Back-end De­tails About Ghost

This blog­ging plat­form is pow­ered by the Ex­press frame­work. It is a Node.js ap­pli­ca­tion. It uti­lizes both SQLite and Jug­gling DB ORM tech­nolo­gies. The them­ing is done via Han­dle­bars, and writ­ing Word­Press Ghost themes can be writ­ten in five minutes.

Ghost is a free open-source pro­gram. You can re­lease it or dis­trib­ute it any­where to any­one for any reason.

About The Ghost Creator

John Nolan, the cre­ator of Ghost, has built web­sites since 2005—only a year af­ter Word­Press was launched. He has de­signed and im­ple­mented many dif­fer­ent blogs for high-pro­­file com­pa­nies in­clud­ing Mi­crosoft, Nokia, Vir­gin At­lantic, MTV, W3 Edge, and more.

How­ever, this ef­fort was not car­ried by him­self alone. Han­nah Wolfe, Se­nior De­vel­oper at Moo.com, also has been a ma­jor in­stru­men­tal force be­hind this project. She has de­vel­oped Word­Press sites for over 10 years.

Word is Spreading

If the Ghost plat­form is not yet known every­where, it soon will be. Blog­gers who want to ad­vance into the fu­ture faster than oth­ers may re­quire at least try­ing this new platform.

[rms] Ralf’s com­ment: Thanks, Amit, for send­ing us this in­cred­i­ble info. This is the first time I heard of the Ghost blog­ging plat­form. At first it seems like a won­der­ful idea.

I checked out their web site, the fea­ture page ac­tu­ally al­lows you to test the Ghost ed­i­tor. It’s easy to over­look: you can type right in­side the fea­ture page - pretty amaz­ing for a page sup­pos­edly only list­ing the features.

That the edit­ing area on the fea­ture page is­n’t rec­og­niz­able as such is a weak­ness, though. At first sight it looks like a screen­shot of the plat­form, with no in­di­ca­tion that it’s in­deed fully functional.

I hope the ac­tual plat­form does­n’t rely on ‘dis­cov­er­ing’ its fea­tures by accident.

One thing that I re­ally don’t get:

Ghost is sup­posed to make blog­ging eas­ier. But I have to learn a new markup spe­cific to this plat­form to for­mat my text.

Huh? Would­n’t it be much eas­ier to click a ‘Head­line’ but­ton to add for­mat­ting in­stead of hav­ing to learn new markup? I don’t see the sim­pli­fi­ca­tion in this for the av­er­age non-pro­­gram­mer user. Non-pro­­gram­mers don’t think in markup, they find up markup an­noy­ing and uncomfortable.

What I love is be­ing able to switch be­tween ar­ti­cles for pre­view and edit­ing on the fly.

From the cur­rent fea­ture page we can’t re­ally see how pow­er­ful this will be (or not), but it tack­les a ma­jor pain point of the ex­ist­ing platforms.

It’s re­ally a pain how time con­sum­ing edit­ing and switch­ing be­tween ar­ti­cles is in Word­Press. I prob­a­bly spend more time wait­ing for pages to load and re-load in Word­Press than with the ac­tual editing.

Will Ghost be a success?

The sup­port they got at Kick­starter is over­whelm­ing. I’m cu­ri­ous who the sup­port­ers are.

  1. Ac­tual every­day blog­gers who would love a sim­ple platform?
  2. Or are they hard core geeks who have a gripe with Word­Press and the rest?

The an­swer to this ques­tion might de­cide the long term fate of Ghost. If it’s only a geek fa­vorite, it’s prob­a­bly not go­ing very far.

The con­cept of Ghost is awe­some, and the site looks beau­ti­ful. I doubt, though, that it will re­ally make a dent in the blog­ging world.

  • Peo­ple hav­ing their blogs on Word­Press, Joomla, Dru­pal, or what­ever, aren’t likely to make the switch eas­ily. They have in­vested too much time and money in their cur­rent plat­form to move every­thing to a new one.
    It’s one thing for blog­gers to now en­thu­si­as­ti­cally blog about how beau­ti­ful Ghost is (like TechCrunch did), but it’s an­other thing to ac­tu­ally make the switch. I doubt TechCrunch will.
  • The ma­jor­ity of fu­ture first time blog­gers will prob­a­bly fa­vor the ‘mar­ket lead­ers’ over a new con­tender, whose fu­ture is uncertain.

My 2 cents: I hon­estly would­n’t put my work and writ­ing into a plat­form that might or might not sur­vive. I started In­ter­net­Busi­ness­Mas­ter­mind 2007 on a mi­nor plat­form, which had some awe­some fea­tures at the time. But it quickly be­came ob­cious they just weren’t de­vel­op­ing their plat­form as fast as the big guys did. One year later I moved to WordPress.

I’d rather ex­pect that the es­tab­lished plat­forms will steal an idea, or two, from the new­comer Ghost and make their plat­form eas­ier to use.