10 ms·

Hey everyone, if you're looking for a fantastic blog engine, I want to tell you about Ghost: https://ghost.org https://ghost.org I found Ghost while looking fo

Hey everyone, if you're looking for a fantastic blog engine, I want to tell you about Ghost: https://ghost.org https://ghost.org I found Ghost while looking for a new blog engine for my company. My first instinct was to use Medium as well, but I ended up hitting a lot of issues because it was impossible for us to customize it (add custom javascript, charts, disable the lame "highlights", custom domain was not free, etc...). 1. Ghost is open source, developed by a foundation in the open. They make their revenue open, their issue tracker, their code, everything. 2. Ghost is self-hostable, as well as hosted on a paid plan. The paid plan is a little pricy (https://ghost.org/pricing/ https://ghost.org/pricing/) but I recommend it if this is for a company blog. 3. Ghost is beautiful out of the box. Here is the default theme: https://blog.ghost.org https://blog.ghost.org -- Here is a slightly customized theme: https://articles.hsreplay.net https://articles.hsreplay.net 4. Ghost has an excellent featureset. It's powered by Markdown and has a wonderful markdown editor in its admin/authorship interface. It also supports authors, editors, contributors, drafts, publishing schedules, tags, etc. Seriously, try it out. I'm not affiliated, just a huge fan. I want to see more people use and support these fantastic open source tools, rather than complain about Medium like there's no alternative.

cknoxrun 9y ago
We use ghost as well, can't say enough good things about it. Digital Ocean also has a pre-configured droplet for it that makes installation / testing pretty seamless.
iDemonix 9y ago
I'm a big fan of Ghost and have just set it up for a friend on free tier AWS for his travel blog. DO droplets have gotten better/bigger lately, and with the one-click install it's a cinch. That said, if anyone's interested, I wrote a post on getting it running on a small VM which I'm currently rewriting for AWS free tier: https://www.danwalker.com/running-ghost-on-a-5-digital-ocean-vps/ https://www.danwalker.com/running-ghost-on-a-5-digital-ocean...
steve_adams_86 9y ago
I'll add my recommendation here too. You can get going with it over at digital ocean with one of their single click images, whatever you call them, and run it fine for $5-$10 per month. I recommend $10, but I believe it'll still install and run fine for low traffic sites on the cheapest tier. It's also really easy to install yourself. They've done a great job on it all around. If you have a blog, give it a shot. It's not a WordPress replacement if you use tons of plugins but it's great writing software. It's also really easy to theme.
- froindt 9y ago
  DO recently upped their specs. Now you get 1 GB ram for $5/month, which are the specs of their previous $10/month tier. I'm going through this weekend and switching my $10 instance to a $5.
  - TaylorAlexander 9y ago
    I may have to check my droplets... do you know if the upgrades automatic by chance?
    - froindt 9y ago
      I don't believe it's automatic. I had 2 512 mb servers and 1 GB server going and none had increased specs automatically.
  - mercer 9y ago
    I recently switched to Hetzner Cloud, which offers significantly more at lower prices. For about $2.50 you get about the equivalent of a $10 droplet. Only downside I can think of is that they don't have servers in the US (AFAIK) and I think they don't have a DNS panel.
    - amedvednikov 9y ago
      According to their FAQ, they are working on it: > Will you add additional locations in different geographic regions? > We are actively looking into this option right now.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
smallbigfish 9y ago
Not mentioned above but "interesting": - requires exactly mysql, nodejs, nginx and at least 1GB RAM. - the only supported setup is Ubuntu 16.04 - has some sort of ghost-cli application used for management. At least for me: not enough fingers for "thumbs down".
- scrollaway 9y ago
  I'd love to have them support Postgres (they dropped support because of not enough developers working on it), but giving it the thumbs down for those reasons seems silly. You either self-host in which case you stuff that on its own docker instance and forget about it, or you use their hosted plan in which case why do you care what software/db engine they run?
- Avamander 9y ago
  One lightweight solution I've found great for blogs is Pelican with m.css, it's really nice and could be served even from a toaster.
  - iagovar 9y ago
    Pelican? Is that a cms?
    - masklinn 9y ago
      It's a static site generator: https://blog.getpelican.com https://blog.getpelican.com
    - Avamander 9y ago
      Combined with git and some webhook to regenerate on change, I think it's better than most CMSs. It's fast, nice-looking (assuming you use a theme, like m.css), secure, doesn't take much storage, really simple, nearly bug-free etc.
solatic 9y ago
> The paid plan is a little pricy It's literally the only problem with Ghost. Wonderful product but boy... how many people are going to pay $29/month or $228/year to host their personal blog? Yeah, there's some serious added value: managed upgrades, managed backups, DDoS protection, CDN setup, etc., and that's wonderful, but still... if you're basically just writing as a hobby, it's too much. I really hope they look into offering some kind of $5-10 hobbyist plan for low-traffic blogs.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  FWIW I don't think Ghost should be used on its paid plan for personal blogs. You can host it on a droplet or AWS free tier pretty easily, otherwise you can use Github pages. I hope Ghost will at some point have a "static site generation" mode though.
  - solatic 9y ago
    You can use a droplet or AWS free tier, you'll just go offline in the "just in case" situation that your site gets hugged to death. Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather not plan for failure in the event of success. Part of the value added in SaaS like Ghost(Pro) is that the infrastructure needed to deal with traffic spikes is built-in. There really ought to be a pricing model along the lines of "I really don't expect this site to get much traffic at all, so sell me a cheap plan for day-to-day expected usage, but just in case something I write happens to go viral, I pre-approve a charge of $100 (or whatever) to deal with the traffic spike, and in case there's new sustained traffic then I'll of course upgrade to a more expensive plan which covers a higher expected rate of day-to-day traffic." Edit: let's put it another way: if you're publishing something to the Internet, it's because you want other people to read it. You therefore want other people to actually be able to read it in the rare but foreseeable circumstance that it becomes popular. If you didn't care about that, and you were really just writing for yourself, you'd just keep an offline journal.
    - scrollaway 9y ago
      > You can use a droplet or AWS free tier, you'll just go offline in the "just in case" situation that your site gets hugged to death Cloudflare in front with aggressive caching? What you're generating essentially is a static site, so it's safe to do that. If your S3 static site gets hugged to death, you won't go offline but you will pay an unexpectedly larger bill, so you should be setting up Cloudflare in front either way.
jwilliams 9y ago
I went through a bunch (including Ghost). Good product, but I eventually ended up using a static site with Netlify. For the static site I used Middleman. It is one of the older generators, but if you're familiar with a Rails environment you can do everything you'll ever need. Not for everyone, but super simple, extremely fast, and completely customizable. Netlify has also taken away all the pain. Simple build and deploy. Superfast DNS and CDN. LetsEncrypt out of the box. Worth a look. That said, the missing piece from Medium isn't the editor/hosting -- it's is the syndication.
- entropie 9y ago
  Because I stumbled the last days over it and found it really a pleasure to workin with; the medium editor is completely usable in your own projects. https://github.com/yabwe/medium-editor https://github.com/yabwe/medium-editor
FlyingSnake 9y ago
While I loved Ghost when it was launched, I've replaced my site with Hugo instead. Hugo + Netlify is free as in beer, and is a much better deal IMO. [1] [1]: https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-netlify/ https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-netlify/
alpb 9y ago
As many others indicated, static sites are much better unless you need dynamic features. Static sites make deployments much easier, doesn't depend on any OS/runtime, doesn't lock you in to a particular database. You just write markdown and with little to no modification, the same thing could just work on Hugo, or Jekyll.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  I use Jekyll; I used Hugo and Pelican in the past. They solve a very specific use case. But if you want to allow guest posting on your blog, a static site will not do. You need something that has drafts, that has a proper editor, that has a UI you can add and invite people to. Ghost solves that.
  - TaylorAlexander 9y ago
    Ghost has drafts, and the editor is fine for me (plain text markdown with instant preview). I think(?) it also supports multiple logins with permission management? I feel like adding a user requires an admin (no self sign up that I know of) but other than that, I think it might do what you’re talking about. I use ghost for my personal site and I love it. (Not that I use multiple authors.)
    - scrollaway 9y ago
      I think you misread my reply. I'm bringing these things up because Ghost can do them.
  - remir 9y ago
    Netlify CMS solved the problem you described. https://www.netlifycms.org/ https://www.netlifycms.org/
    - bmc7505 9y ago
      In theory, is there any reason why this couldn't support git-based comments as well? Maybe through a PR-style interface?
mv4 9y ago
I began using Ghost for a personal blog (on a micro AWS instance) a few months ago, and I'm very happy so far. I also "import" my Ghost articles to Medium - so that helps to get views while helping me maintain control of my publishing.
nvus 9y ago
1. You sound like an advertiser. 2. When I first discovered Ghost (last year) and I heard it's using NodeJS I was expecting a beautiful, responsive, SPA blog engine that is fast. After reviewing it and even trying to use it as a platform for a newspaper I found that (It's just wordpress and it's not using the power of javascript to it's full extent.) Fast => I could and I did built a faster wordpress site. SPA => Nope Customizable => Nope. For me it's not worth the extra capabilities instead of a static blog. I found gatsby(1) great for all my use cases and with some extra work[2] is more dynamic that ghost. 1. gatsby - https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby 2. netlify + contentful - https://www.netlifycms.org/ https://www.netlifycms.org/ + https://www.contentful.com/ https://www.contentful.com/ (I would love to see a CMS that embraces SPA/PWA. On the other side I would hate to serve 1mb of JS just to show 4 paragraphs and 1 picture)
- scrollaway 9y ago
  > You sound like an advertiser Great! I'll happily advertise for Ghost. As I said I'm not affiliated but I am a fan. I especially am a fan because I have a huge respect for open source organizations that run their business like they do.
  - nvus 9y ago
    You're right, I can't comment anything bad on the business model, great respect for being open source and I thank them for they work, just not a fit for someone who was looking for a better Wordpress alternative. Maybe it's just too young. WP is 15 yo already :)) ! Wish you both the very best!
- minitech 9y ago
  > SPA => Nope This seems like a positive aspect for a blog? Most blogs are pretty far removed from being “applications”.
  - nvus 9y ago
    Would that be a negative aspect? Why wouldn't you try to bring the best possible experience to your reader?
zebraflask 9y ago
Ghost is a very nice platform. How do you think it compares to Grav? My firm has been considering both.
devwastaken 9y ago
$19 for 50,000 views a month, only if you buy a whole year. A $5 Google Compute server and NginX can serve 5,000 static assets a second easy. Even more with some optimization. I don't know why your service doesn't scale to be as good as, if not better than that, since you can put more effort into static caching and optimization at scale.

cknoxrun 9y ago

We use ghost as well, can't say enough good things about it. Digital Ocean also has a pre-configured droplet for it that makes installation / testing pretty seamless.

iDemonix 9y ago

I'm a big fan of Ghost and have just set it up for a friend on free tier AWS for his travel blog. DO droplets have gotten better/bigger lately, and with the one-click install it's a cinch. That said, if anyone's interested, I wrote a post on getting it running on a small VM which I'm currently rewriting for AWS free tier: https://www.danwalker.com/running-ghost-on-a-5-digital-ocean-vps/ https://www.danwalker.com/running-ghost-on-a-5-digital-ocean...

steve_adams_86 9y ago

I'll add my recommendation here too. You can get going with it over at digital ocean with one of their single click images, whatever you call them, and run it fine for $5-$10 per month. I recommend $10, but I believe it'll still install and run fine for low traffic sites on the cheapest tier. It's also really easy to install yourself. They've done a great job on it all around. If you have a blog, give it a shot. It's not a WordPress replacement if you use tons of plugins but it's great writing software. It's also really easy to theme.

froindt 9y ago
DO recently upped their specs. Now you get 1 GB ram for $5/month, which are the specs of their previous $10/month tier. I'm going through this weekend and switching my $10 instance to a $5.
- TaylorAlexander 9y ago
  I may have to check my droplets... do you know if the upgrades automatic by chance?
  - froindt 9y ago
    I don't believe it's automatic. I had 2 512 mb servers and 1 GB server going and none had increased specs automatically.
- mercer 9y ago
  I recently switched to Hetzner Cloud, which offers significantly more at lower prices. For about $2.50 you get about the equivalent of a $10 droplet. Only downside I can think of is that they don't have servers in the US (AFAIK) and I think they don't have a DNS panel.
  - amedvednikov 9y ago
    According to their FAQ, they are working on it: > Will you add additional locations in different geographic regions? > We are actively looking into this option right now.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

smallbigfish 9y ago

Not mentioned above but "interesting": - requires exactly mysql, nodejs, nginx and at least 1GB RAM. - the only supported setup is Ubuntu 16.04 - has some sort of ghost-cli application used for management. At least for me: not enough fingers for "thumbs down".

scrollaway 9y ago
I'd love to have them support Postgres (they dropped support because of not enough developers working on it), but giving it the thumbs down for those reasons seems silly. You either self-host in which case you stuff that on its own docker instance and forget about it, or you use their hosted plan in which case why do you care what software/db engine they run?
Avamander 9y ago
One lightweight solution I've found great for blogs is Pelican with m.css, it's really nice and could be served even from a toaster.
- iagovar 9y ago
  Pelican? Is that a cms?
  - masklinn 9y ago
    It's a static site generator: https://blog.getpelican.com https://blog.getpelican.com
  - Avamander 9y ago
    Combined with git and some webhook to regenerate on change, I think it's better than most CMSs. It's fast, nice-looking (assuming you use a theme, like m.css), secure, doesn't take much storage, really simple, nearly bug-free etc.

solatic 9y ago

> The paid plan is a little pricy It's literally the only problem with Ghost. Wonderful product but boy... how many people are going to pay $29/month or $228/year to host their personal blog? Yeah, there's some serious added value: managed upgrades, managed backups, DDoS protection, CDN setup, etc., and that's wonderful, but still... if you're basically just writing as a hobby, it's too much. I really hope they look into offering some kind of $5-10 hobbyist plan for low-traffic blogs.

scrollaway 9y ago
FWIW I don't think Ghost should be used on its paid plan for personal blogs. You can host it on a droplet or AWS free tier pretty easily, otherwise you can use Github pages. I hope Ghost will at some point have a "static site generation" mode though.
- solatic 9y ago
  You can use a droplet or AWS free tier, you'll just go offline in the "just in case" situation that your site gets hugged to death. Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather not plan for failure in the event of success. Part of the value added in SaaS like Ghost(Pro) is that the infrastructure needed to deal with traffic spikes is built-in. There really ought to be a pricing model along the lines of "I really don't expect this site to get much traffic at all, so sell me a cheap plan for day-to-day expected usage, but just in case something I write happens to go viral, I pre-approve a charge of $100 (or whatever) to deal with the traffic spike, and in case there's new sustained traffic then I'll of course upgrade to a more expensive plan which covers a higher expected rate of day-to-day traffic." Edit: let's put it another way: if you're publishing something to the Internet, it's because you want other people to read it. You therefore want other people to actually be able to read it in the rare but foreseeable circumstance that it becomes popular. If you didn't care about that, and you were really just writing for yourself, you'd just keep an offline journal.
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    > You can use a droplet or AWS free tier, you'll just go offline in the "just in case" situation that your site gets hugged to death Cloudflare in front with aggressive caching? What you're generating essentially is a static site, so it's safe to do that. If your S3 static site gets hugged to death, you won't go offline but you will pay an unexpectedly larger bill, so you should be setting up Cloudflare in front either way.

jwilliams 9y ago

I went through a bunch (including Ghost). Good product, but I eventually ended up using a static site with Netlify. For the static site I used Middleman. It is one of the older generators, but if you're familiar with a Rails environment you can do everything you'll ever need. Not for everyone, but super simple, extremely fast, and completely customizable. Netlify has also taken away all the pain. Simple build and deploy. Superfast DNS and CDN. LetsEncrypt out of the box. Worth a look. That said, the missing piece from Medium isn't the editor/hosting -- it's is the syndication.

entropie 9y ago
Because I stumbled the last days over it and found it really a pleasure to workin with; the medium editor is completely usable in your own projects. https://github.com/yabwe/medium-editor https://github.com/yabwe/medium-editor

FlyingSnake 9y ago

While I loved Ghost when it was launched, I've replaced my site with Hugo instead. Hugo + Netlify is free as in beer, and is a much better deal IMO. [1] [1]: https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-netlify/ https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-netlify/

alpb 9y ago

As many others indicated, static sites are much better unless you need dynamic features. Static sites make deployments much easier, doesn't depend on any OS/runtime, doesn't lock you in to a particular database. You just write markdown and with little to no modification, the same thing could just work on Hugo, or Jekyll.

scrollaway 9y ago
I use Jekyll; I used Hugo and Pelican in the past. They solve a very specific use case. But if you want to allow guest posting on your blog, a static site will not do. You need something that has drafts, that has a proper editor, that has a UI you can add and invite people to. Ghost solves that.
- TaylorAlexander 9y ago
  Ghost has drafts, and the editor is fine for me (plain text markdown with instant preview). I think(?) it also supports multiple logins with permission management? I feel like adding a user requires an admin (no self sign up that I know of) but other than that, I think it might do what you’re talking about. I use ghost for my personal site and I love it. (Not that I use multiple authors.)
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    I think you misread my reply. I'm bringing these things up because Ghost can do them.
- remir 9y ago
  Netlify CMS solved the problem you described. https://www.netlifycms.org/ https://www.netlifycms.org/
  - bmc7505 9y ago
    In theory, is there any reason why this couldn't support git-based comments as well? Maybe through a PR-style interface?

mv4 9y ago

I began using Ghost for a personal blog (on a micro AWS instance) a few months ago, and I'm very happy so far. I also "import" my Ghost articles to Medium - so that helps to get views while helping me maintain control of my publishing.

nvus 9y ago

1. You sound like an advertiser. 2. When I first discovered Ghost (last year) and I heard it's using NodeJS I was expecting a beautiful, responsive, SPA blog engine that is fast. After reviewing it and even trying to use it as a platform for a newspaper I found that (It's just wordpress and it's not using the power of javascript to it's full extent.) Fast => I could and I did built a faster wordpress site. SPA => Nope Customizable => Nope. For me it's not worth the extra capabilities instead of a static blog. I found gatsby(1) great for all my use cases and with some extra work[2] is more dynamic that ghost. 1. gatsby - https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby 2. netlify + contentful - https://www.netlifycms.org/ https://www.netlifycms.org/ + https://www.contentful.com/ https://www.contentful.com/ (I would love to see a CMS that embraces SPA/PWA. On the other side I would hate to serve 1mb of JS just to show 4 paragraphs and 1 picture)

scrollaway 9y ago
> You sound like an advertiser Great! I'll happily advertise for Ghost. As I said I'm not affiliated but I am a fan. I especially am a fan because I have a huge respect for open source organizations that run their business like they do.
- nvus 9y ago
  You're right, I can't comment anything bad on the business model, great respect for being open source and I thank them for they work, just not a fit for someone who was looking for a better Wordpress alternative. Maybe it's just too young. WP is 15 yo already :)) ! Wish you both the very best!
minitech 9y ago
> SPA => Nope This seems like a positive aspect for a blog? Most blogs are pretty far removed from being “applications”.
- nvus 9y ago
  Would that be a negative aspect? Why wouldn't you try to bring the best possible experience to your reader?

zebraflask 9y ago

Ghost is a very nice platform. How do you think it compares to Grav? My firm has been considering both.

devwastaken 9y ago

$19 for 50,000 views a month, only if you buy a whole year. A $5 Google Compute server and NginX can serve 5,000 static assets a second easy. Even more with some optimization. I don't know why your service doesn't scale to be as good as, if not better than that, since you can put more effort into static caching and optimization at scale.