9 ms·

Interview with John O'Nolan of Ghost

287 points by riqbal 10y ago

huskyr 10y ago
The headline is a bit misleading, i thought a subscription is $62,000 per month, which is a bit steep :)
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  Not a "bit" misleading but outright misleading. Nobody would relate that to "the business makes $62k per month". Everyone would think it's some sort of "vertu for blogging"
- remx 10y ago
  According to their pricing[1] their lowest price is $19.00/mo. Assuming the bulk of their customers are on this price band it's roughly 3000 paying customers, paying each month. [1] https://ghost.org/pricing/ https://ghost.org/pricing/
  - WesleyLivesay 10y ago
    They had it at $10 a month for a long time for people who started using it early when there were not a ton of features, myself included. So there could be a much higher number than that.
  - pmuk 10y ago
    They're actually really open with their numbers... https://ghost.org/about/ https://ghost.org/about/ Active customers: 4,257 ARPU: $14.40 Monthly Run Rate: $62,796 Requests / month: 80M Registered users: 601,492 Github Stars: 24,921 Themes: 481
  - rdudek 10y ago
    What the, didn't this used to be a lot cheaper?
    - WesleyLivesay 10y ago
      Yes, they raised the price when they hit a certain version milestone.
    - remx 10y ago
      I cant recall it being cheaper than $10.00/mo. If you're looking for something cheaper than ghost there is Posthaven[1]. I'm not affiliated with Posthaven in any way, I just wanted to offer an alternative if anyone is looking. [1] https://posthaven.com https://posthaven.com
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - drakenot 10y ago
      They talk about this in the article.
- sctb 10y ago
  Thanks, we've removed that from the headline.
scalesolved 10y ago
I used to self host Ghost on Digital Ocean and then switched over to their hosted offering. I'm really happy I went with them, the culture and idea behind the company appeals to me and the lack of bells and whistles is made up for in a really simple and fun to use editing experience. At least in my opinion it far outshines Medium.
- startupdiscuss 10y ago
  If I might ask, why did you switch? (I self host on DO as well). Was there a benefit to switching? I should also ask: how much traffic were you getting?
  - scalesolved 10y ago
    I got bored of having to do backups and upgrade versions etc. Also the fact that you can self host at no cost from them made me want to pay them, I like supporting companies and ideas like this. The benefit to switching was really less maintenance and I could concentrate on writing and to invest in the future of Ghost, win/win! My traffic is pretty low, no hits on HN yet! :) Quick glance at Google Analytics seems I hit about 1.5-2k visitors a month.
    - startupdiscuss 10y ago
      As a followup: what were you paying on Digital Ocean? (I know it seems like a small deal to talk about $5 or $25 for your main blog with over 1000 monthly visitors, but a lot of people experiment with dozens of little content ideas.)
      - scalesolved 10y ago
        It would have been the smallest droplet at the time so I think $5. I switched to hosted Ghost July 2015 and haven't looked back. I'd consider self hosting again if I was planning on running lots of different domain/content ideas :)
    - 10y ago
gchp 10y ago
> What's your advice for indie hackers who are just starting out? > Honestly my single piece of advice would probably be to stop looking for so much advice. Shut the fuck up and go and build something. I like this. I see a lot of people, and I fall victim to this myself, over analysing the best way to do X, rather than just trying it and learing / adapting as you go. I think there is some value in figuring things out up front, but not at the cost of never taking the plunge.
- returnbuyer 10y ago
  Yeah that's really cool. Resonates with me. Analysis paralysis is a big problem for introverts.
- sharkweek 10y ago
  I think this is so true across the board. One of my favorite hobbies is writing. But it's so easy to get stuck into overthinking it, reading about writing, reading how other people write, etc etc etc... Instead, I've noticed the best feeling comes from staring at a blank page and just letting the mind work things out in real-time. Sometimes it sucks (maybe most of the time), but it seems like there's plenty of times where it also goes really well.
  - gchp 10y ago
    Totally agree. What I've found too is that once you actually start and get /something/ down on the page (or whatever the medium) you actually find yourself getting into a bit of a productivity flow. It might start off bad, but I find I quickly slip into actually getting stuff done once I get over that initial paralysis.
- melling 10y ago
  I just keep in mind a few words from the early 1980's: "Real artists ship". That pretty much distills it down, right?
- notheguyouthink 10y ago
  The little success i have in life is largely due to this exact model. I have home-built so many big grandiose apps and solved many problems learning them myself. I didn't make any hits, hell i didn't even finish half of them, but i largely solved a lot of problems myself, figuring and learning. Now (for better or worse) i think i'm at the stage where i need to actually improve and deploy them fully. Learn maintenance, learn upkeep, maybe even learn some minor advertising and metrics. Self taught experience has been so insanely valuable. Value derived from pain.. but still value.
koonsolo 10y ago
His first "idea" blog post seemed to have 250,000 pageviews in 1 week, which is quite impressive. I wonder where that inflow came from.
- johnonolan 10y ago
  It was from right here, on this very website, the news of hackers
cridenour 10y ago
> The other one was that we started out on hardware servers. This was right at the early stage of cloud VPS services catching on and becoming mainstream, and we were just behind the curve. It was an expensive mistake. I wouldn't think 2013 was early stage of cloud VPS services - but maybe I don't have a good enough memory of the time.
- johnonolan 10y ago
  It wasn't, technically, but it was in terms of mainstream availability. Digital Ocean started around the same time as us, for reference. So it cloud VPS was just starting to become the popular option, but it was still far from being the obvious default option. The other reason we went with hardware that I didn't mention was that we wanted to cram a whole lot (thousands) of node apps onto every server and we figured being on a bare metal setup would be an advantage to optimising that. (In practice: Not really, as it turns out!)
Jazcash 10y ago
I don't have much to say, except that I've been using Ghost for a while and love it.
eugenekolo2 10y ago
I really like ghost. It's very simple, and straight forward. I've built a couple of websites based on it now, and wrote my own themes. I'm not sure I'd pay for it, but as an open source self-host project, it's pretty great.
iends 10y ago
I've never understood the pricing of ghost. I started a personal blog and my first post got almost 50k uniques when it got to the top of /r/programming and the front page of hacker news. So the pricing model of ghost is problematic because: 1) I don't know what level of plan to buy to support this kind of traffic. 2) $19/mo seems really expensive for a personal blog. (and wouldn't support my traffic load) 3) A $5 instance at DO handled the load really well with room to spare and conservatively took about an hour to setup. So, I guess I'm not their target customer? I want to pay around $10/mo for a hosted blog and support like 500k uniques. There are some wordpress hosts that handle this level of traffic at this price point I think.
- halfdan 10y ago
  They do a rolling average over three months before they ask you to upgrade. So hitting top spot on reddit or HN once or twice shouldn't be an issue.
  - iends 10y ago
    So you're saying I can hit 300k uniques per month for three months before being asked to upgrade to the team plan? Even so, 300k uniques would price you around $80/mo, which seems extremely high to me for a casual blog that can be self hosted on a $5 DO instance and an hours worth of work.
    - pesfandiar 10y ago
      In my opinion, a little bit of it is because of the "hipster premium". The same phenomenon that makes the same food/drink more expensive when served on a cutting board or in a jam jar.
      - jameskegel 10y ago
        I wish the suits from Ghost would weigh in on this, rather than all this conjecture. Can someone from Ghost team give us insight on why there is this disparity other than the obvious "humans must eat"
molly0 10y ago
I was experienceing really poor SEO results for my previous ghost site (self hosted on digital ocean). Never understood why...
- netinstructions 10y ago
  I migrated from Wordpress to Ghost (using some sort of provided Ghost tool) and my site started getting way more hits from search engines. I'm guessing it's because the ghost site was noticeably faster and was mobile friendly, which my old WordPress site was not. I didn't do any SEO tuning or anything.
  - type0 10y ago
    > I migrated from Wordpress to Ghost (using some sort of provided Ghost tool) ... More people should do this. Recent security issues of WP is kinda horrific, but then again it always been a security nightmare. It makes me sad that people don't realize it, the only answer you get is: " but it's so popular so it must be good", well smoking has also been popular - it doesn't mean it's good for you.
donjh 10y ago
I set up Ghost on a DO droplet the other day. Even opting to manually install it rather than use the Ghost on Ubuntu image, installation and setup was a breeze.
ianstormtaylor 10y ago
It's weird that a company as well known as Ghost has a site that feels like a wholesale copy of Stripe's old design. I don't know how I feel about it, slightly negative probably. I think Stripe does a lot of stuff really well, and it makes sense to copy many of the things they do, mostly from the UX and information design aspects. But to copy the branding itself seems like it defeats the point, because it makes Ghost feel cheaper. Check out the Wayback Machine... - Ghost 2017: https://ghost.org/features/ https://ghost.org/features/ - Stripe 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304012926/https://stripe.com/us/features https://web.archive.org/web/20160304012926/https://stripe.co... https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013548/https://stripe.com/relay https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013548/https://stripe.co... https://web.archive.org/web/20160304014557/https://stripe.com/subscriptions https://web.archive.org/web/20160304014557/https://stripe.co... I normally wouldn't have commented on this, but I just saw the "Scale API" startup's site yesterday and noticed that they too were doing a wholesale copy of not just Stripe's information design, but their branding too... - Scale 2017: https://www.scaleapi.com/ https://www.scaleapi.com/ - Stripe 2017: https://stripe.com/radar https://stripe.com/radar https://stripe.com/ https://stripe.com/ It doesn't seem like a smart approach to take, but maybe it works.
- wwalser 10y ago
  Besides the gradient background I'm not really seeing it on the ghost site. On the Scale site I see what you're saying. This comment does bring to mind something I heard a while back. What web developers say to you when they see something you made with bootstrap: "Another bootstrap site." What everyone else says when they see the same thing: "I didn't know you were good at design."
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  I agree with you. Also, thank you for crashing my computer, stripe.com/radar.
- drinchev 10y ago
  Well most of the landing pages nowadays look the same. I like both pages, but I don't think it feels like a copy of Stripe's design.
caycep 10y ago
Hm, I never realized ghost was non-profit....
felixrieseberg 10y ago
Hi, I'm one of the volunteer core devs on Ghost The company is a non-profit that supports journalism and professional publishing. Everything is open-sourced. I'm leading the work on the Desktop App (https://github.com/tryghost/Ghost-Desktop https://github.com/tryghost/Ghost-Desktop), but all projects (server, admin interface, etc) can always use more love. If your company allows you to donate some time to non-profits and you think that democratized journalism is important, consider helping us out
- matart 10y ago
  I am interested and have the cycles. What issues should be started with?
  - felixrieseberg 10y ago
    Neat! To avoid being sucked into anything too big, you might want to check out the "good first" issues on the Desktop App (https://github.com/tryghost/ghost-desktop/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Agood-first https://github.com/tryghost/ghost-desktop/issues?q=is%3Aopen...) or the beginner ones on the heart of it all (https://github.com/tryghost/ghost/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Abeginner https://github.com/tryghost/ghost/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Ais...).
- type0 10y ago
  Thank you for working on it. I found Ghost Desktop App makes the whole platform much more competitive with Wordpress, their App is even called Worpress.com (https://github.com/Automattic/wp-desktop https://github.com/Automattic/wp-desktop) which does not inspire confidence in my view. Do you know how it compares with their app?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ChicagoDave 10y ago
$20/month? Seriously? No thanks.
- choxi 10y ago
  Why does that feel like too much? Just curious how you're thinking about the pricing.
  - fizixer 10y ago
    After taking a look and thinking about it, I think this platform is not for representative HN audience. We can DIY the heck out of an equivalent system based on what we know (languages, tools, platforms, etc). So it's (probably) a product for journalists and all other non-techies for whom the alternative would be to hire one or more dev/devops/sysads. Though that's how django started. So...
  - ChicagoDave 10y ago
    I guess if I was a journalist, it might not be bad price, but I'm just a casual blogger. I currently host my own Wordpress site and keep it up to date myself. As the other reply to your comment mentioned, we're pretty technical here on HN and Ghost is probably something we can hack together on our own. Even so, for the casual blogger, $5/month is probably the max.
    - curuinor 10y ago
      He notes right there that super price sensitive people are actually more demanding and more annoying than less price sensitive folks.
  - tyoverby 10y ago
    I'm not ChicagoDave, but what he wrote resonates with me. I view my blog as an extension of my memory. When I write things, I do it mainly for myself, rather than to appeal to other readers. Because of this, my blog gets practically no traffic. I'm happy with github hosting my ramblings for free.
dreamfactory2 10y ago
> (1) old, unfocused open-source platforms which are tired and broken, or (2) new, amazing publishing systems which are completely proprietary and closed Nothing against Ghost, but I've spent about a decade in the area of content management and publishing and don't recognise 1 or 2. The proprietary market leader is AEM which is atrocious to actually implement once you get past their sales demos, and in open source you have Drupal which is a well proven solution for large and small scale publishing, particularly relevant with Drupal 8 and its publishing focused distro Thunder (both particularly adept at services and deployment, tricky areas in publishing)
- type0 10y ago
  I like Drupal but I would not advise anyone to start a new project on it. Not in a world where we have Django CMS and Wagtail.
  - dreamfactory2 10y ago
    seriously Django and Wagtail? The key challenge any open source platform finds with corporate adoption is support/maintenance and that is largely answered by longevity, size of community and adoption, as well as large Ubuntu or Redhat style private companies behind it offering SLA's, professional services and so on. This is where Drupal and Wordpress shine.
cdnsteve 10y ago
" I had about 30,000 people on a mailing list," This, so much of this.
- csallen 10y ago
  People underestimate how significant a huge mailing list can be!
diminoten 10y ago
Is it just me or was Ghost at one point a "Show HN"? I remember playing with a minimalist blogging platform in Node.JS at one point a couple of years ago, but honestly that could be one of a dozen or so projects.
vickychijwani 10y ago
I've been using Ghost since v0.6, 2 years ago, and I love the community. They're quite helpful on Slack. One thing I think Ghost is missing right now is a solid mobile experience. I'm working to fill this gap with Quill [1], a native Android app for Ghost with an offline mode, image uploads, full Ghost Markdown support, and a sweet design. And it's open-source :) Offline support in particular is IMO going to turn out to be an important feature, because I can imagine Ghost's target audience of journalists wanting to publish quick thoughts from places with a spotty connection. Admittedly I haven't actually validated this - building offline support presents an interesting engg+UX challenge, so that was the original motivator. Feedback has been really positive so far [2], so I'm gonna keep going! Would love to get feedback from HN as well. [1]: https://github.com/vickychijwani/quill/ https://github.com/vickychijwani/quill/ [2]: https://github.com/vickychijwani/quill/wiki/What-users-say https://github.com/vickychijwani/quill/wiki/What-users-say
- dchuk 10y ago
  Are you aware of this library in a very similar space? https://github.com/quilljs/quill https://github.com/quilljs/quill Not trying to put you down, just want to make sure you are aware of the potential naming conflict (both things are for authoring content) in case that creates a legal headache for you one day.
  - vickychijwani 10y ago
    Yes - I only found out about it after I had my app out there with a feather logo and everything. However I don't think it will cause big issues, as quilljs is a JS library, while Quill (the app) is targeted directly at Ghost's users who will largely (presumably) be journalists. The slight name confusion within dev circles is something we'll just have to live with.
mtgx 10y ago
Is there a serious Wordpress/Ghost alternative written in Go yet?
- Curiositry 10y ago
  There’s a lightweight clone written in Go, Journey [1], which uses Ghost themes. It got a fair amount of attention at one point, but development doesn’t look very active at the moment. [1]: https://github.com/kabukky/journey https://github.com/kabukky/journey
audleman 10y ago
The founder thought he had hit upon a real need in the world, but put that the test before starting development. How many people only figure this out two years down the road and thousands of dev-hours wasted? > I wrote down my thoughts in a blog post, and about 1 week and 250,000 pageviews later, I decided to start working on the idea properly. > The next question was: Would they also open their wallets? For this, we went to Kickstarter. If we could get enough validation for people to actually fund the development of the software to a production-ready state, then we knew we would be on to something. I love that his demo for kickstarter was 50% mockups. Truly an MVP.
scancmdr 10y ago
I found the ghost pro product to be very well done. Nice clean and simple interface with only the knobs and buttons needed. Everything worked 100%. It is well worth the $20/month for a company blog. I'm currently hosting my own ghost blog and its just as great, just takes more attention to operate it. The DNS configuration doesn't yet support my provider. I believe they're on cloudflare (!)
simonebrunozzi 10y ago
Well, interesting: > Initially I got a ton of offers for development help from people on Hacker News, which materialized to precisely nothing.

287 points by riqbal 10y ago

huskyr 10y ago

The headline is a bit misleading, i thought a subscription is $62,000 per month, which is a bit steep :)

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
Not a "bit" misleading but outright misleading. Nobody would relate that to "the business makes $62k per month". Everyone would think it's some sort of "vertu for blogging"
remx 10y ago
According to their pricing[1] their lowest price is $19.00/mo. Assuming the bulk of their customers are on this price band it's roughly 3000 paying customers, paying each month. [1] https://ghost.org/pricing/ https://ghost.org/pricing/
- WesleyLivesay 10y ago
  They had it at $10 a month for a long time for people who started using it early when there were not a ton of features, myself included. So there could be a much higher number than that.
- pmuk 10y ago
  They're actually really open with their numbers... https://ghost.org/about/ https://ghost.org/about/ Active customers: 4,257 ARPU: $14.40 Monthly Run Rate: $62,796 Requests / month: 80M Registered users: 601,492 Github Stars: 24,921 Themes: 481
- rdudek 10y ago
  What the, didn't this used to be a lot cheaper?
  - WesleyLivesay 10y ago
    Yes, they raised the price when they hit a certain version milestone.
  - remx 10y ago
    I cant recall it being cheaper than $10.00/mo. If you're looking for something cheaper than ghost there is Posthaven[1]. I'm not affiliated with Posthaven in any way, I just wanted to offer an alternative if anyone is looking. [1] https://posthaven.com https://posthaven.com
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - drakenot 10y ago
    They talk about this in the article.
sctb 10y ago
Thanks, we've removed that from the headline.

scalesolved 10y ago

I used to self host Ghost on Digital Ocean and then switched over to their hosted offering. I'm really happy I went with them, the culture and idea behind the company appeals to me and the lack of bells and whistles is made up for in a really simple and fun to use editing experience. At least in my opinion it far outshines Medium.

startupdiscuss 10y ago
If I might ask, why did you switch? (I self host on DO as well). Was there a benefit to switching? I should also ask: how much traffic were you getting?
- scalesolved 10y ago
  I got bored of having to do backups and upgrade versions etc. Also the fact that you can self host at no cost from them made me want to pay them, I like supporting companies and ideas like this. The benefit to switching was really less maintenance and I could concentrate on writing and to invest in the future of Ghost, win/win! My traffic is pretty low, no hits on HN yet! :) Quick glance at Google Analytics seems I hit about 1.5-2k visitors a month.
  - startupdiscuss 10y ago
    As a followup: what were you paying on Digital Ocean? (I know it seems like a small deal to talk about $5 or $25 for your main blog with over 1000 monthly visitors, but a lot of people experiment with dozens of little content ideas.)
    - scalesolved 10y ago
      It would have been the smallest droplet at the time so I think $5. I switched to hosted Ghost July 2015 and haven't looked back. I'd consider self hosting again if I was planning on running lots of different domain/content ideas :)
  - 10y ago

gchp 10y ago

> What's your advice for indie hackers who are just starting out? > Honestly my single piece of advice would probably be to stop looking for so much advice. Shut the fuck up and go and build something. I like this. I see a lot of people, and I fall victim to this myself, over analysing the best way to do X, rather than just trying it and learing / adapting as you go. I think there is some value in figuring things out up front, but not at the cost of never taking the plunge.

returnbuyer 10y ago
Yeah that's really cool. Resonates with me. Analysis paralysis is a big problem for introverts.
sharkweek 10y ago
I think this is so true across the board. One of my favorite hobbies is writing. But it's so easy to get stuck into overthinking it, reading about writing, reading how other people write, etc etc etc... Instead, I've noticed the best feeling comes from staring at a blank page and just letting the mind work things out in real-time. Sometimes it sucks (maybe most of the time), but it seems like there's plenty of times where it also goes really well.
- gchp 10y ago
  Totally agree. What I've found too is that once you actually start and get /something/ down on the page (or whatever the medium) you actually find yourself getting into a bit of a productivity flow. It might start off bad, but I find I quickly slip into actually getting stuff done once I get over that initial paralysis.
melling 10y ago
I just keep in mind a few words from the early 1980's: "Real artists ship". That pretty much distills it down, right?
notheguyouthink 10y ago
The little success i have in life is largely due to this exact model. I have home-built so many big grandiose apps and solved many problems learning them myself. I didn't make any hits, hell i didn't even finish half of them, but i largely solved a lot of problems myself, figuring and learning. Now (for better or worse) i think i'm at the stage where i need to actually improve and deploy them fully. Learn maintenance, learn upkeep, maybe even learn some minor advertising and metrics. Self taught experience has been so insanely valuable. Value derived from pain.. but still value.

koonsolo 10y ago

His first "idea" blog post seemed to have 250,000 pageviews in 1 week, which is quite impressive. I wonder where that inflow came from.

johnonolan 10y ago
It was from right here, on this very website, the news of hackers

cridenour 10y ago

> The other one was that we started out on hardware servers. This was right at the early stage of cloud VPS services catching on and becoming mainstream, and we were just behind the curve. It was an expensive mistake. I wouldn't think 2013 was early stage of cloud VPS services - but maybe I don't have a good enough memory of the time.

johnonolan 10y ago
It wasn't, technically, but it was in terms of mainstream availability. Digital Ocean started around the same time as us, for reference. So it cloud VPS was just starting to become the popular option, but it was still far from being the obvious default option. The other reason we went with hardware that I didn't mention was that we wanted to cram a whole lot (thousands) of node apps onto every server and we figured being on a bare metal setup would be an advantage to optimising that. (In practice: Not really, as it turns out!)

Jazcash 10y ago

I don't have much to say, except that I've been using Ghost for a while and love it.

eugenekolo2 10y ago

I really like ghost. It's very simple, and straight forward. I've built a couple of websites based on it now, and wrote my own themes. I'm not sure I'd pay for it, but as an open source self-host project, it's pretty great.

iends 10y ago

I've never understood the pricing of ghost. I started a personal blog and my first post got almost 50k uniques when it got to the top of /r/programming and the front page of hacker news. So the pricing model of ghost is problematic because: 1) I don't know what level of plan to buy to support this kind of traffic. 2) $19/mo seems really expensive for a personal blog. (and wouldn't support my traffic load) 3) A $5 instance at DO handled the load really well with room to spare and conservatively took about an hour to setup. So, I guess I'm not their target customer? I want to pay around $10/mo for a hosted blog and support like 500k uniques. There are some wordpress hosts that handle this level of traffic at this price point I think.

halfdan 10y ago
They do a rolling average over three months before they ask you to upgrade. So hitting top spot on reddit or HN once or twice shouldn't be an issue.
- iends 10y ago
  So you're saying I can hit 300k uniques per month for three months before being asked to upgrade to the team plan? Even so, 300k uniques would price you around $80/mo, which seems extremely high to me for a casual blog that can be self hosted on a $5 DO instance and an hours worth of work.
  - pesfandiar 10y ago
    In my opinion, a little bit of it is because of the "hipster premium". The same phenomenon that makes the same food/drink more expensive when served on a cutting board or in a jam jar.
    - jameskegel 10y ago
      I wish the suits from Ghost would weigh in on this, rather than all this conjecture. Can someone from Ghost team give us insight on why there is this disparity other than the obvious "humans must eat"

molly0 10y ago

I was experienceing really poor SEO results for my previous ghost site (self hosted on digital ocean). Never understood why...

netinstructions 10y ago
I migrated from Wordpress to Ghost (using some sort of provided Ghost tool) and my site started getting way more hits from search engines. I'm guessing it's because the ghost site was noticeably faster and was mobile friendly, which my old WordPress site was not. I didn't do any SEO tuning or anything.
- type0 10y ago
  > I migrated from Wordpress to Ghost (using some sort of provided Ghost tool) ... More people should do this. Recent security issues of WP is kinda horrific, but then again it always been a security nightmare. It makes me sad that people don't realize it, the only answer you get is: " but it's so popular so it must be good", well smoking has also been popular - it doesn't mean it's good for you.

donjh 10y ago

I set up Ghost on a DO droplet the other day. Even opting to manually install it rather than use the Ghost on Ubuntu image, installation and setup was a breeze.

ianstormtaylor 10y ago

It's weird that a company as well known as Ghost has a site that feels like a wholesale copy of Stripe's old design. I don't know how I feel about it, slightly negative probably. I think Stripe does a lot of stuff really well, and it makes sense to copy many of the things they do, mostly from the UX and information design aspects. But to copy the branding itself seems like it defeats the point, because it makes Ghost feel cheaper. Check out the Wayback Machine... - Ghost 2017: https://ghost.org/features/ https://ghost.org/features/ - Stripe 2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160304012926/https://stripe.com/us/features https://web.archive.org/web/20160304012926/https://stripe.co... https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013548/https://stripe.com/relay https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013548/https://stripe.co... https://web.archive.org/web/20160304014557/https://stripe.com/subscriptions https://web.archive.org/web/20160304014557/https://stripe.co... I normally wouldn't have commented on this, but I just saw the "Scale API" startup's site yesterday and noticed that they too were doing a wholesale copy of not just Stripe's information design, but their branding too... - Scale 2017: https://www.scaleapi.com/ https://www.scaleapi.com/ - Stripe 2017: https://stripe.com/radar https://stripe.com/radar https://stripe.com/ https://stripe.com/ It doesn't seem like a smart approach to take, but maybe it works.

wwalser 10y ago
Besides the gradient background I'm not really seeing it on the ghost site. On the Scale site I see what you're saying. This comment does bring to mind something I heard a while back. What web developers say to you when they see something you made with bootstrap: "Another bootstrap site." What everyone else says when they see the same thing: "I didn't know you were good at design."
fiatjaf 10y ago
I agree with you. Also, thank you for crashing my computer, stripe.com/radar.
drinchev 10y ago
Well most of the landing pages nowadays look the same. I like both pages, but I don't think it feels like a copy of Stripe's design.

caycep 10y ago

Hm, I never realized ghost was non-profit....

felixrieseberg 10y ago

Hi, I'm one of the volunteer core devs on Ghost The company is a non-profit that supports journalism and professional publishing. Everything is open-sourced. I'm leading the work on the Desktop App (https://github.com/tryghost/Ghost-Desktop https://github.com/tryghost/Ghost-Desktop), but all projects (server, admin interface, etc) can always use more love. If your company allows you to donate some time to non-profits and you think that democratized journalism is important, consider helping us out

matart 10y ago
I am interested and have the cycles. What issues should be started with?
- felixrieseberg 10y ago
  Neat! To avoid being sucked into anything too big, you might want to check out the "good first" issues on the Desktop App (https://github.com/tryghost/ghost-desktop/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Agood-first https://github.com/tryghost/ghost-desktop/issues?q=is%3Aopen...) or the beginner ones on the heart of it all (https://github.com/tryghost/ghost/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Abeginner https://github.com/tryghost/ghost/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Ais...).
type0 10y ago
Thank you for working on it. I found Ghost Desktop App makes the whole platform much more competitive with Wordpress, their App is even called Worpress.com (https://github.com/Automattic/wp-desktop https://github.com/Automattic/wp-desktop) which does not inspire confidence in my view. Do you know how it compares with their app?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ChicagoDave 10y ago

$20/month? Seriously? No thanks.

choxi 10y ago
Why does that feel like too much? Just curious how you're thinking about the pricing.
- fizixer 10y ago
  After taking a look and thinking about it, I think this platform is not for representative HN audience. We can DIY the heck out of an equivalent system based on what we know (languages, tools, platforms, etc). So it's (probably) a product for journalists and all other non-techies for whom the alternative would be to hire one or more dev/devops/sysads. Though that's how django started. So...
- ChicagoDave 10y ago
  I guess if I was a journalist, it might not be bad price, but I'm just a casual blogger. I currently host my own Wordpress site and keep it up to date myself. As the other reply to your comment mentioned, we're pretty technical here on HN and Ghost is probably something we can hack together on our own. Even so, for the casual blogger, $5/month is probably the max.
  - curuinor 10y ago
    He notes right there that super price sensitive people are actually more demanding and more annoying than less price sensitive folks.
- tyoverby 10y ago
  I'm not ChicagoDave, but what he wrote resonates with me. I view my blog as an extension of my memory. When I write things, I do it mainly for myself, rather than to appeal to other readers. Because of this, my blog gets practically no traffic. I'm happy with github hosting my ramblings for free.

dreamfactory2 10y ago

> (1) old, unfocused open-source platforms which are tired and broken, or (2) new, amazing publishing systems which are completely proprietary and closed Nothing against Ghost, but I've spent about a decade in the area of content management and publishing and don't recognise 1 or 2. The proprietary market leader is AEM which is atrocious to actually implement once you get past their sales demos, and in open source you have Drupal which is a well proven solution for large and small scale publishing, particularly relevant with Drupal 8 and its publishing focused distro Thunder (both particularly adept at services and deployment, tricky areas in publishing)

type0 10y ago
I like Drupal but I would not advise anyone to start a new project on it. Not in a world where we have Django CMS and Wagtail.
- dreamfactory2 10y ago
  seriously Django and Wagtail? The key challenge any open source platform finds with corporate adoption is support/maintenance and that is largely answered by longevity, size of community and adoption, as well as large Ubuntu or Redhat style private companies behind it offering SLA's, professional services and so on. This is where Drupal and Wordpress shine.

cdnsteve 10y ago

" I had about 30,000 people on a mailing list," This, so much of this.

csallen 10y ago
People underestimate how significant a huge mailing list can be!

diminoten 10y ago

Is it just me or was Ghost at one point a "Show HN"? I remember playing with a minimalist blogging platform in Node.JS at one point a couple of years ago, but honestly that could be one of a dozen or so projects.

vickychijwani 10y ago

I've been using Ghost since v0.6, 2 years ago, and I love the community. They're quite helpful on Slack. One thing I think Ghost is missing right now is a solid mobile experience. I'm working to fill this gap with Quill [1], a native Android app for Ghost with an offline mode, image uploads, full Ghost Markdown support, and a sweet design. And it's open-source :) Offline support in particular is IMO going to turn out to be an important feature, because I can imagine Ghost's target audience of journalists wanting to publish quick thoughts from places with a spotty connection. Admittedly I haven't actually validated this - building offline support presents an interesting engg+UX challenge, so that was the original motivator. Feedback has been really positive so far [2], so I'm gonna keep going! Would love to get feedback from HN as well. [1]: https://github.com/vickychijwani/quill/ https://github.com/vickychijwani/quill/ [2]: https://github.com/vickychijwani/quill/wiki/What-users-say https://github.com/vickychijwani/quill/wiki/What-users-say

dchuk 10y ago
Are you aware of this library in a very similar space? https://github.com/quilljs/quill https://github.com/quilljs/quill Not trying to put you down, just want to make sure you are aware of the potential naming conflict (both things are for authoring content) in case that creates a legal headache for you one day.
- vickychijwani 10y ago
  Yes - I only found out about it after I had my app out there with a feather logo and everything. However I don't think it will cause big issues, as quilljs is a JS library, while Quill (the app) is targeted directly at Ghost's users who will largely (presumably) be journalists. The slight name confusion within dev circles is something we'll just have to live with.

mtgx 10y ago

Is there a serious Wordpress/Ghost alternative written in Go yet?

Curiositry 10y ago
There’s a lightweight clone written in Go, Journey [1], which uses Ghost themes. It got a fair amount of attention at one point, but development doesn’t look very active at the moment. [1]: https://github.com/kabukky/journey https://github.com/kabukky/journey

audleman 10y ago

The founder thought he had hit upon a real need in the world, but put that the test before starting development. How many people only figure this out two years down the road and thousands of dev-hours wasted? > I wrote down my thoughts in a blog post, and about 1 week and 250,000 pageviews later, I decided to start working on the idea properly. > The next question was: Would they also open their wallets? For this, we went to Kickstarter. If we could get enough validation for people to actually fund the development of the software to a production-ready state, then we knew we would be on to something. I love that his demo for kickstarter was 50% mockups. Truly an MVP.

scancmdr 10y ago

I found the ghost pro product to be very well done. Nice clean and simple interface with only the knobs and buttons needed. Everything worked 100%. It is well worth the $20/month for a company blog. I'm currently hosting my own ghost blog and its just as great, just takes more attention to operate it. The DNS configuration doesn't yet support my provider. I believe they're on cloudflare (!)

simonebrunozzi 10y ago

Well, interesting: > Initially I got a ton of offers for development help from people on Hacker News, which materialized to precisely nothing.