
Open-source blogging platform Ghost begins rolling out its fully-hosted service - potshot
http://thenextweb.com/media/2013/12/16/open-source-blogging-platform-ghost
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sergiotapia
I'm using Ghost to host my blog:
[http://www.sergiotapia.me/](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?"

~~~
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".

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jmathai
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.

~~~
pera
yes... I mean, I'm paying $5 for my VPS, so the same amount for a blog seems
"too much".

And yes: those who are looking for a free blog would choice WP or some static
system on GitHub.

$1/month would be interesting for me (and even more if I can pay with
bitcoin), but I don't know anything about marketing :P

~~~
dkuntz2
You can run Ghost on that VPS...

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speakme
What does Ghost offer that can't be accomplished on Medium?

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jaryd
For starters, it's open source!

[https://github.com/tryghost/Ghost](https://github.com/tryghost/Ghost)

~~~
speakme
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.

~~~
dkuntz2
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.

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ganessh
Octopress is more fun :) No offense

