
Ghost: The Future of Blogging (Node.js) - robhawkes
http://tryghost.org/
======
kolektiv
It looks rather good! But I do wonder if I'm the only person who was more than
a little put out once I found it was the "hostage" model of open source - i.e.
pay us enough money and we'll release this. Of course, there's nothing to say
you can't do this, and I do applaud people finding ways to make OSS pay. But
this way leaves a funny taste - it feels somehow counter to the spirit of the
thing.

Possibly my ire was raised a bit further by the fact that I found that out in
what seemed a slightly bait and switch-y way - "Try this!" _click_ "Maybe
later if you pay us!" Hmmmm.

Those gripes aside, it looks pretty.

~~~
api
Stuff takes time to make, and time costs money unless you are independently
wealthy or have a trust fund.

This looks gorgeous, but many of these features are non-trivial to implement.

~~~
mrgoldenbrown
It's fine to ask for money, but they could solicit money without declaring
themselves open source yet, with a promise to do so in the future, or they
could actually release the source now, and continue to solicit money. Instead
they are claiming to already be open source but not actually opening anything.
I think that's what got people a little put off.

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kleiba
_Err, about that..._

Could anyone tell me what's written at the bottom of the dialog box that pops
up when you click the _"Ready? Try Ghost"_ button, please? My computer is a
10'' netbook, and the box is outside the visual range of my screen.
Unfortunately, the scrollbar scrolls the grayed out background, not the box
itself, so I have no chance of doing anything other than hitting the back
button.

(To give them credit, what I _can_ read is: "We've built a prototype, and it's
working really well! But there's a lot to do.")

Is there a page I can access directly to try Ghost out, without having to go
through that box?

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cschmidt
No, that page just points to the Kickstarter project. You have been tricked.

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mbesto
_Right now the leading open source new media publishing projects are driven by
PHP communities. It's easy to see why, with a well-established and vibrant
ecosystem, the PHP community is strong. But, it comes with its limitations,
and recently other technologies have taken the lead on innovation._ [1]

Which limitations are that? I'm curious as to who their user is here. My
grandmother or my friend who is a developer? For my grandmother, Wordpress
suits perfectly. For my developer, Jekyll.

I feel like this is solving a non-problem here. The UI looks great, but then
why not just stick it on top of the Wordpress admin?

[1] - <http://blog.tryghost.org/>

~~~
phillmv
For delivering a _CMS_ , your server side is totally tech agnostic. The major
innovations left are all client side.

If anything, people's major complaint with Wordpress is that it's a horrible
tangle of spaghetti. What's the state-of-the-art for Node.js web frameworks?

There'd be a lot of irony in launching an aesthetically pleasing CMS admin
panel overtop yet-another spaghetti engine that is hard to augment.

~~~
Wintamute
I've got high hopes for this. The currently popular web framework for Node.JS
is Express (built on top of Connect), which has built on the success of stuff
like Sinatra and Rails, and (dare I say) improved on them in some areas.
Express/Connect uses the concept of middleware which helps to make defining
functionality extremely modular and encapsulated, so hopefully together with
the active JS community, plus the excellent package manager npm, should make
it really easy (and not too spaghetti-like) to work with a Node.JS based
platform.

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googletron
I am not sure I like this trend of people kickstarting things that they
actually dont need money for.

For example, these guys are web developers and designers, what could possibly
stop them from building it and putting on the web? Hardly the 25K pounds they
are asking for.

I think the product is awesome, but I dont understand what you need the money
for especially if they are boasting Open Source and not for profit.

~~~
iSnow
Well if you give your product away under a liberal license like MIT, then you
either need a lot of subscribers to your paid hosting plan or you have a
problem.

Therefore, I like the trend of kickstarting open source project:

\- the initial phase where you have to work hard and yet don't have a lot to
show gets funded

\- you are forced to think about it in terms of a product to attract backers

\- there's less incentive to pivot the hosted platform into a user-tracking
and data mining outfit later.

~~~
googletron
Please don't be contrary and think your process through.

They do a kick starter today, what about tomorrow? not for profit doesn't mean
they dont charge fees, I am sure they will charge. I am not belittling their
efforts but they have all the required skills and enough financial ability
(seems like they have held jobs previous to this) to pay for hosting till that
can become a reality.

Your supporting arguments sound like, they were made up to back your purely
contrary conclusion.

~~~
iSnow
I don't get your point. They develop the software as open source. Free as in
beer|speech. They develop a hosted version. This service is not free.

I see no contradiction.

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jaredstenquist
Title changed again for this post? It should clearly say this is a link to
promote their fundraising. There is no actual way to try this service.

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zachgersh
Seems like we have come full circle and now blogging is again the new "it"
product. I would be interested to see this compete against Medium in the space
(though they have different use cases). Would be interested to know why
blogging has become a hot button product all over again.

in case you are forgetting all the awesome blogging related items that have
cropped up in the last few months:

1\. <https://posthaven.com/> 2\. <https://medium.com/> 3\.
<http://draftin.com/> 4\. <https://svbtle.com/>

That's just off the top of my head.

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nhangen
TLDR;

This is a Kickstarter pitch, in which case I'm quoting myself:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5610715>

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DoubleMalt
Nice project, but I d think SQlite will not cut it. Not even in the short run.

Other than that, definitely an interesting project.

~~~
LandoCalrissian
I would imagine that there will be some other DB options to come out pretty
quickly once they release the source.

~~~
DoubleMalt
Doubtless. But never estimate the power of sane defaults.

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dreamdu5t
Why is Ghost the future of blogging, exactly? Nobody is going to take-on
WordPress without a plugin architecture and a plan to host it.

~~~
andypants
Because it has a spiffy minimalist design and a dashboard. Everybody loves
those (right now).

Sarcasm aside, it looks pretty nice but I don't see anything particularly
revolutionary that I would move away from a more established platform.

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twog
Im a little confused by the choice to use Node.js, whats the purpose? The
creator says that ghost is not a blogging platform for developers, but then
builds a node.js blog?

~~~
Wintamute
Why not use Node.JS? It's technically feasible to use it, and it'll be fun to
fill in the blanks in terms of coding new tools and utilities that are missing
the community right now. If they make something good it'll remove a lot of the
friction for web developers to write plugins for it too ... we get to use
JavaScript and a first class modern package manager. For non-developers I
reckon it'll be much easier to host and deploy their own Ghost apps ... using
npm its practically the equivalent of a one click install, and super easy to
get onto a Cloud host like Heroku too. Much easier I'd say than provisioning
Apache, PHP, a database, then installing Wordpress.

Anyway, what's all this negativity towards somebody trying to do something
with new tech? I thought we all like that sort of thing?

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zalew
Free. Open. Try it.

If you pay us. Oh...

Seems really nice though.

~~~
robhawkes
There is no payment. Funding is for development, the software is free.

~~~
zalew
I know. Nothing wrong with that approach, but being teased to try a demo and
getting redirected to a fundraiser instead is a bit weird.

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spion
I love the markdown editor, especially the auto-scrolling feature.

The only problem is that it doesn't really scroll to the part you're editing -
instead it assumes that if you've scrolled to 50% in the markdown code, the
preview should also scroll to 50%. Add a couple of images and this assumption
becomes false.

I know this is hard to do (involves hooking into the markdown parser) but it
would truly be a killer feature.

~~~
bhauer
I posted this in the other thread, so I apologize if it's redundant. I agree,
auto-scrolling the preview panel is important. In my personal blog, I didn't
use Markdown, but rather just plain HTML (with some minor tweaks). What I did
to synchronize the editor and preview was:

1\. Find the shortest path out of a currently-edited tag (look to see if the
cursor is between a nearby set of < and > characters). In most cases, the
cursor is not in a tag, so this is not needed.

2\. Insert an empty marker span.

3\. Find that span in the preview pane.

4\. Find the span's parent block, add a class to that block to highlight it,
and then scroll to its location.

Seen here: [http://tiamat.tsotech.com/images/tiamat-
authoring-2012-10.pn...](http://tiamat.tsotech.com/images/tiamat-
authoring-2012-10.png) (the yellow paragraph at the bottom right)

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tryjottit
Hasn't Aaron Swartz's <http://www.jottit.com> solved this problem for years
now?

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.

~~~
antidaily
Your SSL is messed up.

------
babby
I'm willing to bet they will finish it anyway. I'm sure a lot of us know that
feel when you get something to prototype, holy crap it works stage. Something
that you would use in the future with the bonus that many others may too. That
feeling when you _have_ to finish the project at least to a point where it
works properly.

They have that feel, but they also want some money for their troubles - to
justify/legitimize it as worth their time.

It's a blogging platform after all. Their feature set could be done by one man
in 2 to 5 weeks time with some experience and perseverance. I hate to belittle
it below its merit, as I do think some features of Ghost make for something
potentially useable. The project also could be nice because of the so-called
committed team behind it maintaining it into the future, as Wordpres does.

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jbigelow76
I'd like to back this but, it looks great but there seems to be some
conflicting info between their words and the kickstarter parameters. They say
they want to deliver something, I'm guess it's alpha-ish code by summer, but
the 120 pound pledge level says you get access 3 months before everyone else
(meaning it would have to be right around the corner) but it's slated for a
November 2013 estimated delivery?? Are they tying the Nov 2013 date to the
release of the community site?

I'd just like some clarification of when I can get my grubby little hands on
some code, especially if that date will change based on funding levels.

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nwienert
Probably as good a time as any to mention this, but I've pushed up a work in
progress Obtvse 2[0] to my github. With a user account system, live filtering,
easy themes via pull requests, and quite a lot of improvements. It will be
undergoing many changes over the next few weeks but is worth taking a peek:

[0] <https://github.com/natew/obtvse2>

Admin: <http://cl.ly/image/0o450t3C3c3G>

Edit with Live Preview: <http://cl.ly/image/0w052g1n1U40>

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kenperkins
My first reaction to "Free. Open." is where's the github link? I know you're
funding the development with KickStarter, but free and open projects should
still having the planning and initial development in the open. That way you
can get feedback more easily, solicit contributors, as well as get early
adopters.

If you want me to give you money, I'd like to see progress (and provide
feedback) along the way, not just wait for the v1.0 release.

So in this case, it seems like you're using "Free and Open" as a label to get
interest, but you're not really that keen on actually being open.

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wambotron
It felt a bit "Try it, LOL JK!"

I understand why kickstarter exists, and I think it's a decent tool for some
projects. That said, it's difficult for me to back something that's only
screenshots and a brief "this is totally how it works" box on the main site. I
want to be able to check out how the product works from the inside out. If I
believe in it, I'll put money towards it. If I don't, I won't.

In this case, I can't demo it to a point where I'd say "this is a worthy
product."

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AdrianRossouw
honestly, i think something like jekyll (with prose.io) is the best blogging
platform there is.

if there was a decent node.js based jekyll replacement, I would be using that.

~~~
adregan
prose.io impresses the hell out of me. Hopefully it evolves to the point where
it can be hosted on your own server.

~~~
Jack000
+1. Wish I could use it internally at work. Instead I had to code something
custom..

As far as can tell it's just the authentication that binds to Github.

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JangoSteve
Interesting project, I don't really have anything to say beyond what the other
comments here point out. Slightly off-topic, the /features.html page makes a
really nice informative homepage. Their actual homepage is useless; it reminds
me of the "Enter here" landing pages of the 90s. Is there some reason to
structure the informational site this way that I'm missing?

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jalada
The irony of when I tried to add their blog to my feed reader
(<http://www.rivered.io> by the way)...it said there was no feed...

Guess RSS doesn't belong in the future.

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jgmcelwain
What happened to the original plan to base Ghost on Wordpress? I love Node as
much as the next guy, but surely basing it on Wordpress and therefore PHP
would make it much accessible.

~~~
programminggeek
Basing this on WordPress is a bad idea. At a certain point to move in a
different direction, you can't be shackled to an existing thing just because
it's popular.

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andyhmltn
"I see the future of WordPress as a web operating system" - Please no no no.
Having worked with Wordpress for the past few weeks, I sincerely hope I never
have to again.

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ing33k
pretty cool but I clicked the link because the title included node .. why is
it included in the title ?

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jvzr
The app itself is developed with nodejs.

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twog
The original ghost platform was supposed to be developed in php
<http://john.onolan.org/ghost/>

Im guessing thats why OP specified node.js in the title

~~~
joeblau
AHHH, I knew I had seen this thing before!

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TopazGuru
What about trilldy.com?

~~~
DoubleMalt
Unrelated.

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orochi235
DUPE ARTICLE! DUPE ARTICLE! OMG GUYS IT'S A DUPE!

I just migrated here from Slashdot; am I doing it right? :p

~~~
freehunter
No. That's not appreciated.

