When this article notes “the product has evolved significantly from humble beginnings,” that’s in a certain amount of tension with the claim immediately before

When this article notes “the product has evolved significantly from humble beginnings,” that’s in a certain amount of tension with the claim immediately before it: “Ghost’s mission from the start has been to create a focused platform for professional publishers.” In fact, “humble beginnings” is a link to John O’Nolan’s original post introducing “Project Ghost,” and while that post talks about publishing it never mentions professional once. The entire argument being advanced in that post, in fact, is that WordPress evolved so far from its blogging platform roots that there was space for someone to create a new system that refocused on blogging. Ghost’s original slogan, as seen in that very first linked post, was “Just a blogging platform.” Ghost 5.0 talks about the work being done in the last few major versions: introducing support for Patreon-esque membership tiers, Substack-esque email newsletters, support for videos, podcasts, and other “diverse types of content.” It now describes itself as “a modern CMS.” To be clear, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. But to paraphrase Mr. O’Nolan: Ghost, by anyone’s definition, is no longer “just a blogging platform.” So is there space for someone to create a new system that refocuses on blogging? Maybe. Blogging isn’t exactly seeing a resurgence, but I think it’s seeing renewed interest. Hugo, Jekyll, et. al. aren’t that new system, because they’re very much targeted to, if not developers, the kinds of people who read Hacker News. I know I’d personally love a light blogging engine that wasn’t entirely static, and that did have things like a built-in editor and out-of-the-box support for Micropub (or even Metaweblog) APIs and other “IndieWeb” artifacts.