The First Five Years of Ghost

michaelkpate · 2018-05-16 21:21:31

After 5 years and $3M, here’s everything we’ve learned from building Ghost

I remember trying it out when it was announced. I didn’t think it was that interesting and honestly kind of forgotten about it.

philwareham · 2018-05-16 21:44:41

I was one of the Kickstarter backers back when Ghost was but a handful of photoshop visuals. And whilst it didn’t turn out exactly like those visuals I do keep a copy running locally out of interest. I quite like parts of it and the UI is pretty but I’ve never published a site with it. It’s more of a competitor to Medium than a CMS platform really.

Destry · 2018-05-17 10:35:24

I also gave them 10 bucks in the original kickstarter for reasons beyond me now. I have some Ghost thing somewhere, judging by the occasional emails I get from them (fitting name, in fact), but I’ve never looked at it once. I too promptly forget about it, as I probably will after this post. Ultimately it’s just another centralized blog platform, and that’s why I can never bring myself to use it. The only centralizing I want to do anymore is publish my own writing on my own domain.

gaekwad · 2018-05-17 14:52:29

Destry wrote #311862:

Ultimately it’s just another centralized blog platform, and that’s why I can never bring myself to use it.

Well…not 100%. It’s open source, freely downloadable and readily-installable on many modern VPS-grade servers. Ghost Pro is the centralised version for $.

I did install Ghost myself some time ago, learned the basics of Nginx, Node, plus a few other bits…then realised I had nothing to write, had an existential crisis and powered off.

But yeah, looked nice, some of the GUI stuff was really nice – Insta-preview with Markdown was lovely.

Destry · 2018-05-18 07:23:31

gaekwad wrote #311863:

Well…not 100%. It’s open source, freely downloadable and readily-installable on many modern VPS-grade servers. Ghost Pro is the centralised version for $.

Ah, that rings a bell. They had two offers. The platform is what I was thinking of. A kickstarter donation got you a spot on the platform. I’ve never used it. I wouldn’t even know how to find my account at this point. I guess I should find it, and kill it at least as part of my auditing.

some of the GUI stuff was really nice – Insta-preview with Markdown was lovely.

That also rings a bell. I think back when we had the mag running, I had an exchange with Mr. Dale in the Txp’s G+ community about the preview thing. He was not for split-screen previews, if I recall. I think I was proposing to him a For/Against double-article showdown for the magazine (you know, being the editor and looking for material), but I realized it was not going to be productive. Still, hard-click views are stable and effective. I have no problem with those either. ;)

I love preview, but I think swipe views are the best solution to them. Not fixed split screens, not tabbed or hard-click views like Txp, but swipeable views like iA Writer employs, as one excellent example, which you can also do with the table of contents if you’re writing multi-page pieces. Though it can be a little touchy at times; too easy to accidentally swipe.

bici · 2018-05-18 15:49:25

michaelkpate wrote #311858:

After 5 years and $3M, here’s everything we’ve learned from building Ghost

I remember trying it out when it was announced. I didn’t think it was that interesting and honestly kind of forgotten about it.

i like this quote:

Unfortunately I think Github itself has a lot to do with this. The product has become too transactional – more support tool than collaboration. And Github themselves show remarkable disinterest in the open source community as a whole – they give us beta access to test new features every so often. That’s about it. There’s no wider involvement at all.

colak · 2018-05-18 16:51:17

Imagine how much our devs could do if they were offered $3M for 5 years. If Michael did not post about this here, I would have forgotten that Ghost actually exists.

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#1 2018-05-16 21:21:31