28 ms·

Ghost Launches to The Public

475 points by jallardice 13y ago

brenfrow 13y ago
Ghost got launched to the public, but how come I didn't get an email after signing up on there list. Seems like that would be an important place to make an announcement.
r0muald 13y ago
It would be neat if there were import/export plugins for WordPress. Import plugins for Jekyll are a killer feature IMHO (can't really force myself to accept using Disqus for comments though, which makes me like Ghost).
- r0muald 13y ago
  Just noted that there is a WordPress to Ghost plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/ghost/ http://wordpress.org/plugins/ghost/ and that you can export a JSON dump of your Ghost blog from e.g. http://localhost:2368/ghost/debug/ http://localhost:2368/ghost/debug/ (not otherwise linked from the admin).
nopassrecover 13y ago
Repository available on GitHub: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost
joeblau 13y ago
Awesome! I've been following John O'Nolan's project since it was announced on Kickstarter. I even started writing my own version which is up on GitHub[1]. Just signed up and I'm looking forward to the future of this project. Just incase anyone else is looking for the source code, it's here: https://github.com/tryghost https://github.com/tryghost [1] - https://github.com/joeblau/bl0g https://github.com/joeblau/bl0g
chrisbridgett 13y ago
Ghost looks great and I'll likely end up using it for a couple of projects but.. "We have successfully created the world's first fully functioning blogging platform built entirely with JavaScript." Really? The world's first entirely JavaScript blogging platform? Google turns up plenty, albeit not quite as polished.
- robmcm 13y ago
  Perhaps that level of polished is part of what comprises "fully functioning".
- gexla 13y ago
  It's tricky to argue labels. To me (right or wrong) platform suggests support, active development, community, backing, a reason to believe that development will continue and something you can build on. Of course, you can call platform whatever you like though. Ghost has many (all?) of the above, and that's relatively rare in any ecosystem (PHP, Ruby, Python, whatever) for a young project. If this project can continue building momentum, then it would truly be unique in general and certainly in the JS ecosystem. ETA: When I say tricky throwing around labels, I mean one thing can mean one thing to me and something else to you. I guess semantics would be the short word for that.
wiremine 13y ago
This is the firs I've heard for ghost. Here's the Kickstarter page for anyone else looking for more info: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-blogging-platform http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-...
antocv 13y ago
Why is there no link to the ghost service from the blog? I hate all these blog pages that dont link to the page they are for.
- jallardice 13y ago
  There's a link to the GitHub repository which I believe is all that is currently available. You can clone the repo (or download an archive of it) and install the platform from that.
  - oe 13y ago
    There's also http://ghost.org/ http://ghost.org/ which holds a lot of information, but blog.ghost.org doesn't link there.
- rocky1138 13y ago
  There is a link in the footer, but I'm with you on your main point.
cjbprime 13y ago
Nice! I see it's using nodejs/express. Great to have another large nodejs webapp out there publicly -- I wonder if there's any generally useful tech inside Ghost.
- jallardice 13y ago
  > I wonder if there's any generally useful tech inside Ghost One of the nicest things about it (aside from the use of node and express, which is very nice IMHO) is that it's open source so you can start looking through the code to find out.
jermaink 13y ago
What would you say is the biggest difference compared to Svbtle and Medium? From a first glimpse: Plus: - Good design, simple to use, friendly colors. - MIT license. - Well done support forum. Minus: - Features should be more clear. - I might be mean but when I read "Just a blogging platform", I automatically read "Just a(nother) blogging platform." - Better replace the laptop+wodden table+moleskine+coffee stock image with something better. Everyone is using that stuff right now. If you want to be different, better look different. - Why the name "Ghost"? Maybe it has some meaning? - Git Link way too hidden. Good job!
- uptown 13y ago
  "What would you say is the biggest difference compared to Svbtle and Medium?" Svbtle and Medium are hosted (and as a result, controlled-by) a 3rd party. You host Ghost yourself, giving you complete control over the platform. I think a better comparison would be probably be to Wordpress.
  - jermaink 13y ago
    Got it.
  - rattray 13y ago
    I'm choosing between this and Medium, and the user-facing design (at least the theme demo'd on their blog) looks similar. I'd like to hear a comparison (though happy to throw wordpress in the consideration pool too)
    - andyhmltn 13y ago
      Medium is 'locked in.' Basically, if you want to make money from your articles or get decent analytics you're stuffed.
    - subpixel 13y ago
      That's not comparing apples-to-apples. Ghost is to Wordpress what Medium is to Facebook.
    - 13y ago
marcamillion 13y ago
I would love to see an easy way to publish this to gh-pages on Github. Are the posts stored in a db or are they generated HTML?
- shitduck 13y ago
  Ghost uses SQLite by default, but the ORM allows for other databases seamlessly.
  - marcamillion 13y ago
    It's awesome that it has an ORM - but ever since I have started using Octopress, which is based on Jekyll, is the more I realize that we don't need a DB for 'just blogging'. Plain, old, generated HTML works perfectly. Plus it is very easy to host. If this is something you guys can implement, I would suggest looking at it. Your hosting will be MUCH simpler, cheaper, more profitable (even though you say you are running a non-profit), general footprint will be smaller, and pages will load quicker. That's just my $0.02. I love what I see here, but I can't bring myself to going back to a db-powered blog from Octopress. The day you guys implement something similar, you will have 1 more user though! Either way....awesome execution and congrats on everything you guys have done. Love it so far.
    - Xylakant 13y ago
      > is the more I realize that we don't need a DB for 'just blogging'. That works for you and me (we're using jekyll here) but not for people that want timed releases and an online editor. Comments will need some sort of database as well, so you'll have to rely on disqus or similar if you're running a static blog.
      - marcamillion 13y ago
        Ahhh....you are right. Good point. Comments (outside of Disqus), timed-releases and online editor. Interesting. I can see that.
      - 13y ago
rocky1138 13y ago
Looks nice. Hate to shit on their sandwich, but the main question I'm asking is "why would I use this and not Wordpress?"
- hugofirth 13y ago
  SO many reasons, many of which boil down into the following sentiment: - Wordpress has become a over-convoluted behemoth, with a needlessly complex structure that is not overly extensible. It is a pain to develop for/with/around. I think everyone can appreciate the very tangible effect that Wordpress has had on the web. However, it is currently in the rather painful throws of a transition from blogging platform to CMS, and has been for quite some time. There are number of other reasons: - You want to avoid PHP. - You don't need most of the feature bloat that comes along with Wordpress. - You want to use Markdown. - You want to try something different.
  - rocky1138 13y ago
    I love php. I also love developing Wordpress themes and plugins. I'm not sure you're making a convincing argument. Then again, Markdown would be neat to work with, but in the end I'd just rather use html if I need to markup something. And I do like trying new things.
    - grin 13y ago
      Plenty of ways to try Markdown within Wordpress: http://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/markdown http://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/markdown
    - kerryritter 13y ago
      Agreed. WordPress is hardly difficult to extend or build for.
    - hugofirth 13y ago
      I develop with PHP regularly and absolutely love the strides the community has been making with Composer, the PSRs & frameworks like Laravel. I have also built tooling, plugins & themes for wordpress. I personally found it to be a frustrating experience: like I had been lobbed back to the days of PHP 4 when I thought all the PHP haters might have had a point (I wish to be emphatic - I don't think this anymore). From a development perspective: - The "loop" is bad design - with no regard for separation of concerns and maintainability. - The lack of namespacing means you have to go through a dance, working around Wordpress's idiosyncratic structure, in order to build around Wordpress effectively. - I personally don't think much of their documentation.
nodata 13y ago
Anyone got a list of features? This page doesn't tell us much. Edit: http://www.ghost.org/features/ http://www.ghost.org/features/ Looks like markdown+looks stylish. Not sure what else.
moneyrich4 13y ago
been using this for a while things i've noticed so far (.3.0): - no dash yet - no view posts by category feature - no list top 10 most recent posts - kind of confusing or redundant mvc abstraction i hacked up a view posts by category and a template swap by hostURL in a few hours but the code is really abstracted. it will probably make sense later when all the features are implemented though. good: - easy to install - love the editor - love the admin - templates are handlebars and easy i've been following this for ~6 months now and am stoked to use it. congrats on your release. can we please have a CMS style feature were we can edit some static pages to go into our blogs! PLZ!
- fit2rule 13y ago
  Hey ... I've been playing with Ghost now for a few hours and wondering if you've gotten any new templates set up, or have tips for template tweaking? I'm a newcomer to bourbon and sass ..
  - moneyrich4 13y ago
    yea ive made a few templates i recommend just copything the casper folder and renaming it. (content/themes/casper) make your own stylesheet and comment theirs out (it, styles, everything). theirs is screen.css. you can comment out the ghost included {{body_class}} and {{ghost_foot}} by changing them to {{!body_class}} and {{!ghost_foot}} after that its just 3 files, default.hbs which is a global template (so its like the html head body tags), and then they insert the body at {{body}} the body comes from index.hbs or post.hbs, which will be index.hbs: 6 article summaries in a list with a page at the bottom. and post.hbs which will just show 1 post. the data in the post and index hbs files (handlebars templates) has stuff like {{eachpost}} {{post}} which is all you really have to keep out of those files
  - moneyrich4 13y ago
    whoops. dupe post.
- dmackerman 13y ago
  Looking at the client side code makes me wonder why people would ever use Backbone. It's so abstracted, mixes DOM manipulation into views. I should re-write it with Angular! :)
mrottenkolber 13y ago
I can't take anyone seriously who uses fonts to display icons (it doesn't work when you turn off foreign fonts!) Sadly, nowadays thats pretty much everyone. If you want me to care about you (apparently/marketwise you don't), then get your design right. Tip: Design is not looking pretty. Design is this question: Does it work?
- rushabh 13y ago
  I can't take anyone seriously who does not uses fonts to display icons, Turn off foreign fonts (?) maybe 0.001% of web users do that.
- addedlovely 13y ago
  Um, surely that is an edge case? I haven't disabled foreign fonts, and haven't had issues from any clients either? Are there any statistics on this? Fonts to display icons reduce HTTP overhead and scale, looking great on retina screens.
- andyhmltn 13y ago
  I think the case for supporting retina screens + very fast load times far outweighs the amount of users that turn off foreign fonts (it baffles me why you would)
- teamonkey 13y ago
  Why would you turn off foreign fonts? There are some very good reasons why you'd want icons in a font. For example, font rendering is well supported by all browsers and very configurable through CSS, and if the default font size is increased for accessibility reasons the icons can also scale.
- hellweaver666 13y ago
  Is disabling fonts the new disabling Javascript and/or HTML emails? Something done by overly paranoid uber-nerd types and completely ignored by 99% of typical users.
- stephen_g 13y ago
  I feel this is a lot like how people used to object to websites that required JavaScript because they had it switched off... If you're going to use the web at all, you're probably going to need to change your setup so icon fonts work, because it's only going to get more common.
aram 13y ago
It's great to see how Kickstarter helped also "stabilize" the development of Open Source software (another example is Django Migrations project [0] which has been discussed here a couple of times already). It helped Ghost provide something on a much higher and usable level than most other Open Source projects did, which should have positive impact on the user/community adoption. I'm speaking here about collaboration with Digital Ocean, Rackspace and Envato, as well as the marketing campaign by Kickstarter before this release. DOcean, RackSpace and Envato alone will generate pretty high traffic and build up the community, especially if Envato (with Tutsplus/Nettuts) starts doing something similar as for Laravel [1][2][3], and provide free developer introduction to the platform. Glad to see this, hope it will keep up the expectations. [0] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-migrations-for-django http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-migr... [1] http://laravel.com/ http://laravel.com/ [2] http://net.tutsplus.com/tag/laravel/ http://net.tutsplus.com/tag/laravel/ [3] https://tutsplus.com/course/laravel-essentials/ https://tutsplus.com/course/laravel-essentials/
- BCM43 13y ago
  I think it's the idea in general, not the specific platform. Joey Hess was able to successfully run his own crowdfunding campaign with custom written software. https://campaign.joeyh.name/ https://campaign.joeyh.name/
  - aram 13y ago
    I agree about the crowdfunding idea; very often I find myself saying/attributing "Kickstarter" when I really mean "crowdfunding" :) Thanks for the Git-Annex link - didn't know he ran a campaign on his own after doing it on Kickstarter.
matteodepalo 13y ago
I really like the idea of having images for popular hosting providers like Digital Ocean and Rackspace; this should lower the entry level difficulty tremendously. I wish Discourse would do something similar, as I believe it would spread the adoption very quickly.
- ridruejo 13y ago
  You can use the BitNami installers to install them anywhere, including the hosting providers you mention. BitNami also supports Discourse
  - matteodepalo 13y ago
    Wow I didn't know that, thank you!
- yapcguy 13y ago
  > Digital Ocean are one of the most popular VPS hosts in the world Where is the proof of this? Any hard data on customer account numbers or growth? There are lots of solid VPS providers out there. I don't see why Digital Ocean gets so much hype.
  - pearkes 13y ago
    Currently, they are 21st in the world for web facing computers[1]. The growth has been pretty good, too. [1] http://trends.netcraft.com/www.digitalocean.com http://trends.netcraft.com/www.digitalocean.com
- nickstinemates 13y ago
  You can run discourse by issuing an command on any Linux host: https://index.docker.io/u/srid/discourse/ https://index.docker.io/u/srid/discourse/
eugeneross 13y ago
After briefly looking over documentation, it seems that Ghost doesn't support post types like links, asides, images, etc. Or did I overlook something? If else, future implementation?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
bachback 13y ago
Very, very interesting. There are a lot of to be announced in there, especially pricing. But as this is opensource I thank the creators of this and will hope to contribute.
calibwam 13y ago
Is the registering on ghost.org for hosting a blog on that page, or to obtain the prepackaged zip files the README at github talks about? In other words, to host ghost myself, do I need to register at ghost.org or do I have to clone the github repo?
- pkrefta 13y ago
  Registering is for hosting a blog. Code is available on Github.
- zedpm 13y ago
  Eventually you'll be able to their hosted service, but for now when you register you just get access to a source download for self-hosting and access to their forums.
Touche 13y ago
Browsed the code a little bit and my overall impressions are the while the code quality is good, it's a shame that it seems to be tightly coupled to doing a database as the backend. I was hoping to fork Ghost, or even better just provide a plugin for it, that uses static file creation instead of a db backend but looking at the code this looks like it's going to be a bit of work to do. I'll probably still do it but it would have been nice if the db stuff had been abstracted a little further out
- Anonmattymous 13y ago
  I completely agree, if you decide to do it and need any help PM me. With something lightweight like this it would definitely be a lot better with a simple file system instead of a whole database that you need to set up and deal with. I have done something similar before in PHP, but the Ghost front end is really nice.
  - thecolorblue 13y ago
    Second on PM'ing for help. I have been interested in node.js CMS's and this has been the most promising one. I have not dug into the code yet.
    - 3825 13y ago
      How do I PM someone on hacker news?
      - cfontes 13y ago
        You don't. Maybe you can try looking into one profile.
        thecolorblue 13y ago
        Yeah, my bad, I assumed you could. send me a message on twitter. @thecolorblue.
    - deleted 13y ago
mradmin 13y ago
I would recommend splitting out the monolithic Gruntfile.js into individual config and task files. It makes it easier to read, in my opinion. I've put together an example here: https://github.com/badsyntax/gruntfile https://github.com/badsyntax/gruntfile
- davexunit 13y ago
  Off topic, but someone please explain to me what Grunt does that is so special? It seems like it's re-inventing Make for no good reason.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
theklub 13y ago
Man, I was all excited for some open source ghosting software.
bencollier49 13y ago
Hmm, isn't this name caught by trademark law in the UK? Ghost is almost certainly a trademark of Symantec; wouldn't this fall into the same trademark category?
- pkrefta 13y ago
  Let's hope that there'll be no problems such as this and it'll solved in good spirit some day.
  - bencollier49 13y ago
    We wouldn't want problems like this haunting the project in future.
    - phillc73 13y ago
      More likely it will be a specter over the entire project for years to come.
      - Macsenour 13y ago
        Booooooooo (But I laughed anyway)
stevoski 13y ago
A demonstration of how we (I?) judge projects and people via the wrong criteria; as I watched the video, this is what went through my mind: * "Oh, a New Zealand accent. One of us! I hope this is really awesome and I want to try this out already." * "Oh, he says he was in charge of WordPress interface design for two years. Using WordPress causes me pain. I expect this product to be painful."
- jonahx 13y ago
  I don't think anyone is invulnerable to this. The only (partial) salvation is to be aware of it, take it with a (big) grain of salt, and try to overcome it with factual reasoning when making decisions.
- danso 13y ago
  > "Oh, he says he was in charge of WordPress interface design for two years. Using WordPress causes me pain. I expect this product to be painful." Sadly, this is too common of a fallacy in judgment, and one that seems most non-fallacious on its face. But whether we want to admit it or not, sometimes output and achievements are highly impacted -- even dependent -- on the organization and institution than the individual. So someone highly successful at Apple retail, for example, may flounder at JCPenney's (http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/a-dose-of-realism-for-the-chief-of-j-c-penney/ http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/a-dose-of-realism-for...). So it goes both ways. It's wrong to argue that someone who was great at once place will necessarily be great at another. And conversely, someone who's work turned out awful at one place (either by poor management or design-by-committee), may flourish in different circumstances
- wmeredith 13y ago
  "Oh, he says he was in charge of WordPress interface design for two years. Using WordPress causes me pain. I expect this product to be painful." Wait, what? WordPress' backend may be a mess, but it's CMS interface is the only one I've ever trained a non-technical person on that they liked or seemed to be able to use right away. I worked at a marketing/dev shop for years and have probably trained 40-ish non-techy clients (usually small marketing teams of 3-4) on customized CMS installs. WordPress' dashboard was by far the best when it came to power/usability ratio.
xdite 13y ago
Try Logdown http://logdown.com/demo http://logdown.com/demo
girvo 13y ago
I'm really impressed with the buy-in they've got from other companies regarding it. I wonder how they achieved that.
spindritf 13y ago
What are the best practices for deploying a node.js app from git on Ubuntu behind nginx? I'm sure someone has a blog post on that but "Ghost" makes it a bit difficult to google for. In case anyone's looking, this PPA[1] seems to come recommended and has an up-to-date node. [1] https://launchpad.net/~chris-lea/+archive/node.js/ https://launchpad.net/~chris-lea/+archive/node.js/
- hippich 13y ago
  I am using Dokku
  - andreypopp 13y ago
    Which in this case would make things a little more difficult cause Ghost uses SQLite and Dokku can't deploy apps which use it because of default Node.js Heroku buildpack which prohibits SQLite usage. You can patch a buildpack though. For example in my fork of Dokku I replaced Heroku buildpacks with plain Dockerfiles to define both a stack and a runtime dependencies — https://github.com/andreypopp/upaas https://github.com/andreypopp/upaas
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    How are you liking it? It's very handy for launching apps, for sure, but I'm wondering how you can configure services (e.g. how do I set up redis persistence or nginx directives or postgres backups?).
- NathanKP 13y ago
  This is a good guide which explains the best technique I've found, and which I'm currently using in production for the startup I work for: http://blog.argteam.com/coding/hardening-node-js-for-production-part-3-zero-downtime-deployments-with-nginx/ http://blog.argteam.com/coding/hardening-node-js-for-product... Basically Nginx is used as a reverse proxy to serve requests from a pool of Node.js processes, each with its own internal port. So you would set up the Node.js app to run internally on ports 8080, 8081, 8082, and 8083 for example. (If you have a quad core server this assures that under extreme load each processor can be fully utilized by one single-thread Node.js process). Then Nginx serves requests on port 80 by fetching the response from one of those four internal ports in round robbin fashion. If one of the processes crashes due to a bug or you want to specifically restart it so that a new code update takes effect in production then Nginx will automatically remove it from the pool while it is down and then add it back when it comes back online. When you are pushing out code updates you can cycle each process one at a time to do a zero downtime deploy. The other cool thing that you can do with Nginx reverse proxies is use the proxy_cache as a robust cache layer to almost completely remove stress from your blog under high load. Honestly for a basic personal blog this technique probably isn't really necessary. You could just run it through Forever on port 80 with no Nginx and forget it, but if you expect tons of traffic, or if you want high 99% uptime, or if you just want to have some fun configuring a server then the technique I explained above is how you do it. It takes some fiddling to get Nginx configured properly and that tutorial I linked actually leaves out some details of the upstream server configuration but its pretty easy to figure out from the Nginx documentation.
sw00 13y ago
Anyone remember Specter? Very simple blogging engine with elasticsearch backend. http://brislink.github.io/specter/ http://brislink.github.io/specter/ I don't think it's out to replace Wordpress like Ghost is trying to do though.
dschiptsov 13y ago
Let's make predictions, at what amount of active users they will realize that NodeJS is a meaningless waste of resources and will try to migrate to something else?)
- babby 13y ago
  But it's not. I just launched a website that handles many taxing db queries over multiple pages and I'm able to achieve ~500 requests per second on a single worker with some simple memory caching. PHP is a waste of resources in the proper sense of the terminology, thus this Ghost stuff is fundamentally better.
  - dschiptsov 13y ago
    Everything, even Rails, looks great compared to PHP.))
- aram 13y ago
  You forgot the close the </stupidity> tag, so it doesn't affect other members.
  - dschiptsov 13y ago
    Oh, sure. Under this very tag I could mention that using JS outside a browser, especially on the apps that by its nature should be a tiny layer on top of an OS's services is an idea with, ironically, related to another great one - Desktop Java Apps, and both of there great ideas are somehow appear as an reflection of one another in a grotesque mirror. They never works as expected.) There is no justification of using any VM for an (cache-able) I/O bound apps. Why do they need nginx as a front-end if NodeJs so great?) Could the whole engine be implemented as a few nginx's modules using another ready modules?) Oh, sorry, I forgot to close the tag.
- cjbprime 13y ago
  I don't understand. As far I've seen, NodeJS is faster than Django/Rails in approximately every scenario, and that's a large part of the reason people are switching to it. So either you're confused about the relative performance of Node against the other most popular frameworks, or you dislike all of the most popular frameworks and have your own preference for a webapp that you're failing to mention, and that most people disagree with you on the merits of. Which is it?
termain 13y ago
I know that the hosting service is not the platform, but i found the terms of service to be a bit onerous. They require full legal names, for one and I don't understand this part: "you have, in the case of Content that includes computer code, accurately categorized and/or described the type, nature, uses and effects of the materials, whether requested to do so by Ghost Foundation or otherwise" There's also the combination of reserving the right to take down any content for any reason. That's fine for a free service, but unacceptable for a paid one, particularly one that claims that it needn't give refunds.
ElongatedTowel 13y ago
Well, I tried taking a look at it, but the setup is kind of funky. * [edit] Download link seems to have been fixed. * Cloned the repo instead and set everything up. Cloning the submodule for the theme didn't work due to some rights issue. Cloned it by hand then. * Setup was pretty easy otherwise, even though I'm using the development version. * [edit] Nevermind. You can signup without the mail sender beeing setup, just not recover the password it seems. Notifications per mail are also disabled. Should have read more carefully. * No direct link to the interface on the blog index (or am I blind?). Have to add /ghost by hand. * Rest seems pretty nice, though barebone. No comment system, why? The only benefit to static blogs that is left is the online editor.
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  I just downloaded the Bitnami stack instead of going through the login process. Bitnami seems to have added some bloat to themselves, however: they used to provide you with a straight VM image; now they have an installer and what seems to be a self-contained VM. The cynical part of me assumes that something in this stack is phoning home and perhaps making me part of some evil botnet, but hopefully not ;).
  - ElongatedTowel 13y ago
    While signing up is mentioned several times on their page it doesn't seem to be required in any way to run your own version. I hope the broken download is just a bug. Signing up just so you can download the package would be pretty annoying.
    - rmrfrmrf 13y ago
      Oh, I just figured that sign-up was required from reading the copy: > Open Signup on Ghost.org The most important piece of news, of course, is that Ghost.org is now open for signups from everybody. Get over there, create your account, grab your username, download Ghost, and check out the forums. The top comment only confirmed my suspicions.
- fit2rule 13y ago
NKCSS 13y ago
Trying to install it fails on sqlite3 for me (Windows 8). Too bad; wanted to check it out quickly, but if the firs thing you do starts throwing errors, I'm not really tempted to continue fiddling. 15923 error sqlite3@2.1.16 install: `node build.js` 15923 error `cmd "/c" "node build.js"` failed with 1 15924 error Failed at the sqlite3@2.1.16 install script. 15924 error This is most likely a problem with the sqlite3 package, 15924 error not with npm itself. 15924 error Tell the author that this fails on your system: 15924 error node build.js 15924 error You can get their info via: 15924 error npm owner ls sqlite3 15924 error There is likely additional logging output above. 15925 error System Windows_NT 6.2.9200 15926 error command "C:\\Program Files\\nodejs\\\\node.exe" "C:\\Program Files\\nodejs\\node_modules\\npm\\bin\\npm-cli.js" "install" "--production" 15927 error cwd C:\Users\Nick\Downloads\ghost-0.3.2 15928 error node -v v0.8.16 15929 error npm -v 1.1.69 15930 error code ELIFECYCLE 15931 verbose exit [ 1, true ]
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- spleeder 13y ago
  Update Node to the latest stable version and you should have no more problems.
  - NKCSS 13y ago
    That did the trick :) Might be good to add some pre-condition where you tell the user to update to a supported version of node before attempting to install :)
yankoff 13y ago
How people find energy to create yet another blogging platform.
zenmaker 13y ago
What's so fascinating about the momentum that gathered behind Ghost and it's funding campaign was that they selling the feature-set in part, but maybe in even larger part, the fact that it wasn't WP. My sense was that people backed it as much out of a sense of "sending a message to David" as they did wanting something better.
kh_hk 13y ago
I've been looking forward to this release. Not because I want the blogging platform, but to take a look. In the node world, it's easy to find reference code on libraries and modules, but I always fail to find a source of some practices further developed than todo lists. It is not about the code (which as far as I have looked is Ok), but about tying technologies and practices together. Here, we got a node express backend with handlebars as the templating engine, defined grunt tasks, some unit tests and backbone on the client. I am really looking forward to keep diving as the project progresses!
- 2mur 13y ago
  Check out issacs npm-www[0] too. I found it helpful for trying to learn how to get things done sans express. [0] https://github.com/isaacs/npm-www https://github.com/isaacs/npm-www
  - babby 13y ago
    I used this a bit :). I think everyone should make their own frameworks from scratch so they know exactly how it all works. By the end of it you might, like me, just continue with your own framework (when you can of course).
- 59nadir 13y ago
  > Here, we got a node express backend with handlebars as the templating engine, defined grunt tasks, some unit tests and backbone on the client. JS BINGO! Sorry, I couldn't resist. I'm something inbetween disgusted and amused by this soup of JS libraries and buzz words. I feel like I'm gonna vomit while laughing.
  - kh_hk 13y ago
    Yes, libraries have names. Names are meant to represent and be used to refer to these libraries. The same could apply to any web project in any language: Here, we got a python flask backend with mustache as the templating engine, defined fabric tasks, some unit tests and backbone on the client. CPU sensitive tasks are handled by Celery or RQ, on Redis or RabbitHQ. Maybe you would prefer: Here, we got <Insert your language here> , with no templates, some bash scripts to build the project, no unit tests and a half-assed mess of javascript spaghetti code tied together on the client. I must ask, if you do build websites, how do you (or if you do): - Use a framework - Use templates - Minify and build assets - Test your code It's been many years since we have moved from frameworks that do everything, to small libraries that do one thing and to it well, sometimes opinionated or not. For me, choice is better. It is always a good pass time to look how people build their projects, compare it on how you are doing it, and decide if you can learn something from that. I might be wasting my time, and your comment was just an opportunity to bash on a language or community. I could not care less, as I have no cards on this game. Just use whatever works for you.
AhtiK 13y ago
Is there a caching layer built in or how does it make sense to create a blogging platform with the performance of NodeJS?
postfuturist 13y ago
> No one expects an app written for OSX 10.4 Tiger to work on OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion. That's truly sad.
- danso 13y ago
  Why is that? I think you're misled by OSX's numbering system, which uses .x where other operating systems might use whole numbers. In fact, I misestimated myself...I thought each dot-version represented a year, with Tiger being 4 years old. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger However, Tiger is actually 8 years old. I don't think obsolesence in eight years is too horrible.
camus 13y ago
Congratulations to Ghost,i'm sure it will be a successfull plateform , and nodejs has interesting capabilities (socket.io,great libraries).It could become a serious Wordpress competitor indeed.
Finster 13y ago
Will Symantec's trademark lawyers be a threat here?
guynamedloren 13y ago
Possibly a silly question, but can a non-profit get acquired? If so, how does that work?
philliphaydon 13y ago
Meh, database, pass. I liked the idea of Jekyll of writing markdown and compiling it to static HTML so I wrote Snow to see if it was possible in .NET, now just refactoring and adding features. Markdown and Static files for a blog is the way to go.
madradavid 13y ago
After 30 minutes all i can say is Build failed [sqlite3]: 1 npm ERR! weird error 1 npm ERR! not ok code 0
leke 13y ago
I've installed ghost to my raspberry pi and have... > ghost@0.3.2 start /var/www/servers/www..dyndns.org/pages/ghost > node index Ghost is running... Listening on 127.0.0.1:2368 Url configured as: http://my-ghost-blog.com http://my-ghost-blog.com Ctrl+C to shut down 127.0.0.1:2368 gives me an unable to establish a connection error (btw, I'm ssh-ing into my pi on the lan). and also 127.0.0.1:2368/ghost where I am meant to access my admin account setup. Any idea what went wrong?
- leke 13y ago
  If anyone finds this on google, and is having the same problem... Because I was ssh-ing into the pi, in the config file, I had to change the localhost address to my pi's address on the lan. Then access it via that lan address with the suggested port.
lambda 13y ago
Taking a look at their "idea" page, I found myself nodding along with most of their bullet points (or shrugging and saying "not exactly my preference, but I can see why you'd want that"), until I hit: Ghost would have cut-off points with major versions, allowing core developers to remove old code from the codebase and evolve the platform to allow it to improve. No one expects an app written for OSX 10.4 Tiger to work on OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion. Oh, hell no. Backwards compatibility is way more important than some shiny new feature. When I upgrade my software, I expect it to work better, not break. If I have a working plugin from 5 years ago, why should I have to fight with some pointless API redesign just to get it to work again? In the real world, people need compatibility more than they need whatever cleanup you're able to do by breaking compatibility. Heck, in many cases you can get both by doing your rewrite but leaving a compatibility layer on top that gives you the compatibility that you need. I'm so sick of trendy "modern" frameworks like Rails that break compatibility every 5 minutes, and listing breaking compatibility as a major feature is a huge turnoff. How about focusing on spending the pre-1.0 releases iterating and designing a really good API that will be amenable to backwards compatible extensions, and then sticking to that API and backwards compatible extensions to it for the forseeable future?
- karolisd 13y ago
  Especially for a young project, I think this is ok. You don't want it to be set in stone too early. Once there is an established ecosystem around Ghost, there will be a lot more pressure to keep it stable.
  - benologist 13y ago
    Even better than that is pressure to keep addons/plugins/whatever up to date. I think there's some good precedence for that with Firefox who (still?) deliberately broke all their extension compatibilities on every release, and contrary to that Wordpress who've led to a fully automated exploit ecosystem.
    - jeffreyjflim 13y ago
      I don't know about Firefox doing that on purpose, but the addon that I've written (Link Exposé) has seen several releases of firefox (19.* to 24.*) without having to do an (api) "update". It's written using the new jetpack SDK (now "Add-on SDK") - and there is a commitment to keeping that api stable.
nickstinemates 13y ago
It took a bit of effort as the code is unstable, but I've managed to create a pretty interesting Dockerfile[1]. Just run a git clone, git submodule init, and then docker build from within that directory. That will then allow you to have an instance to test and play around with. I also have an instance up and running[2] if you want to play with it. Messing it up doesn't matter to me as I will just docker run a new one. Have fun. Username: nstinemates@gmail.com Password: demodemodemo 1: https://github.com/keeb/Ghost/blob/add-dockerfile/Dockerfile https://github.com/keeb/Ghost/blob/add-dockerfile/Dockerfile 2: http://stinemat.es:49429/ghost/ http://stinemat.es:49429/ghost/ edit: One of you lovely gentle souls decided to change the demo password. Thanks for making me have to `docker stop` then `docker run` a new one and inconveniencing me for all of 2 seconds. Link updated.
- illyism 13y ago
  Using "nick" as username gives me: "invalid e-mail".
  - nickstinemates 13y ago
    ah - nstinemates@gmail.com is the login then. I'll edit.
- mrjatx 13y ago
  Seems like they changed it again
  - nickstinemates 13y ago
    Oh well. At this point I'll just point to the Dockerfile and say run that :) It takes less than a minute! Or if you want a private instance I will make no guarantees about just send me a note. I'll be happy to provide it on a subdomain of your chosing.
andybak 13y ago
I always felt node.js needed a Rails or a Django before it needed a layer on top of that. i.e. a content-oriented MV-whatever framework. By my understanding node.js is rather low-level to be a good platform for content-driven sites. Is this inaccurate?
beshrkayali 13y ago
"too many blogging platforms, not that many quality content providers."
officialjunk 13y ago
anyone do a security audit?
lobo_tuerto 13y ago
A link from the project's homepage to the source code in github would be great.
adamtulinius 13y ago
Warning; the zip-file explodes into a mess, make sure to extract it into a directory (unzip -d ghost-0.3.2 ghost-0.3.2.zip).
tonilin 13y ago
I see many user have some hard time setting up the Node.js / npm environment before being able to get Ghost up and running. I would expect the editor of Logdown much better to use. It reads Github Flavored Markdown, has code highlighting, drag & drop image upload. And it's an online service, so you don't need to deal with the server stuffs. Much easier to use. http://logdown.com/demo http://logdown.com/demo
dingdingdang 13y ago
What is it with web pages / blogs and their wild tendencies with using 18px+ fonts for the body text? I can read something like a third of the text off the screen as compared to for an example HN?! Ridiculous that I have to be habituated to using the zoom feature in Firefox to simply read a page instead of looking at one and a half paragraph like is the case on Ghost.org

475 points by jallardice 13y ago

Ghost got launched to the public, but how come I didn't get an email after signing up on there list. Seems like that would be an important place to make an announcement.

r0muald 13y ago

It would be neat if there were import/export plugins for WordPress. Import plugins for Jekyll are a killer feature IMHO (can't really force myself to accept using Disqus for comments though, which makes me like Ghost).

r0muald 13y ago
Just noted that there is a WordPress to Ghost plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/ghost/ http://wordpress.org/plugins/ghost/ and that you can export a JSON dump of your Ghost blog from e.g. http://localhost:2368/ghost/debug/ http://localhost:2368/ghost/debug/ (not otherwise linked from the admin).

nopassrecover 13y ago

Repository available on GitHub: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost

joeblau 13y ago

Awesome! I've been following John O'Nolan's project since it was announced on Kickstarter. I even started writing my own version which is up on GitHub[1]. Just signed up and I'm looking forward to the future of this project. Just incase anyone else is looking for the source code, it's here: https://github.com/tryghost https://github.com/tryghost [1] - https://github.com/joeblau/bl0g https://github.com/joeblau/bl0g

chrisbridgett 13y ago

Ghost looks great and I'll likely end up using it for a couple of projects but.. "We have successfully created the world's first fully functioning blogging platform built entirely with JavaScript." Really? The world's first entirely JavaScript blogging platform? Google turns up plenty, albeit not quite as polished.

robmcm 13y ago
Perhaps that level of polished is part of what comprises "fully functioning".
gexla 13y ago
It's tricky to argue labels. To me (right or wrong) platform suggests support, active development, community, backing, a reason to believe that development will continue and something you can build on. Of course, you can call platform whatever you like though. Ghost has many (all?) of the above, and that's relatively rare in any ecosystem (PHP, Ruby, Python, whatever) for a young project. If this project can continue building momentum, then it would truly be unique in general and certainly in the JS ecosystem. ETA: When I say tricky throwing around labels, I mean one thing can mean one thing to me and something else to you. I guess semantics would be the short word for that.

wiremine 13y ago

This is the firs I've heard for ghost. Here's the Kickstarter page for anyone else looking for more info: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-blogging-platform http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-...

antocv 13y ago

Why is there no link to the ghost service from the blog? I hate all these blog pages that dont link to the page they are for.

jallardice 13y ago
There's a link to the GitHub repository which I believe is all that is currently available. You can clone the repo (or download an archive of it) and install the platform from that.
- oe 13y ago
  There's also http://ghost.org/ http://ghost.org/ which holds a lot of information, but blog.ghost.org doesn't link there.
rocky1138 13y ago
There is a link in the footer, but I'm with you on your main point.

cjbprime 13y ago

Nice! I see it's using nodejs/express. Great to have another large nodejs webapp out there publicly -- I wonder if there's any generally useful tech inside Ghost.

jallardice 13y ago
> I wonder if there's any generally useful tech inside Ghost One of the nicest things about it (aside from the use of node and express, which is very nice IMHO) is that it's open source so you can start looking through the code to find out.

jermaink 13y ago

What would you say is the biggest difference compared to Svbtle and Medium? From a first glimpse: Plus: - Good design, simple to use, friendly colors. - MIT license. - Well done support forum. Minus: - Features should be more clear. - I might be mean but when I read "Just a blogging platform", I automatically read "Just a(nother) blogging platform." - Better replace the laptop+wodden table+moleskine+coffee stock image with something better. Everyone is using that stuff right now. If you want to be different, better look different. - Why the name "Ghost"? Maybe it has some meaning? - Git Link way too hidden. Good job!

uptown 13y ago
"What would you say is the biggest difference compared to Svbtle and Medium?" Svbtle and Medium are hosted (and as a result, controlled-by) a 3rd party. You host Ghost yourself, giving you complete control over the platform. I think a better comparison would be probably be to Wordpress.
- jermaink 13y ago
  Got it.
- rattray 13y ago
  I'm choosing between this and Medium, and the user-facing design (at least the theme demo'd on their blog) looks similar. I'd like to hear a comparison (though happy to throw wordpress in the consideration pool too)
  - andyhmltn 13y ago
    Medium is 'locked in.' Basically, if you want to make money from your articles or get decent analytics you're stuffed.
  - subpixel 13y ago
    That's not comparing apples-to-apples. Ghost is to Wordpress what Medium is to Facebook.
  - 13y ago

marcamillion 13y ago

I would love to see an easy way to publish this to gh-pages on Github. Are the posts stored in a db or are they generated HTML?

shitduck 13y ago
Ghost uses SQLite by default, but the ORM allows for other databases seamlessly.
- marcamillion 13y ago
  It's awesome that it has an ORM - but ever since I have started using Octopress, which is based on Jekyll, is the more I realize that we don't need a DB for 'just blogging'. Plain, old, generated HTML works perfectly. Plus it is very easy to host. If this is something you guys can implement, I would suggest looking at it. Your hosting will be MUCH simpler, cheaper, more profitable (even though you say you are running a non-profit), general footprint will be smaller, and pages will load quicker. That's just my $0.02. I love what I see here, but I can't bring myself to going back to a db-powered blog from Octopress. The day you guys implement something similar, you will have 1 more user though! Either way....awesome execution and congrats on everything you guys have done. Love it so far.
  - Xylakant 13y ago
    > is the more I realize that we don't need a DB for 'just blogging'. That works for you and me (we're using jekyll here) but not for people that want timed releases and an online editor. Comments will need some sort of database as well, so you'll have to rely on disqus or similar if you're running a static blog.
    - marcamillion 13y ago
      Ahhh....you are right. Good point. Comments (outside of Disqus), timed-releases and online editor. Interesting. I can see that.
    - 13y ago

rocky1138 13y ago

Looks nice. Hate to shit on their sandwich, but the main question I'm asking is "why would I use this and not Wordpress?"

hugofirth 13y ago
SO many reasons, many of which boil down into the following sentiment: - Wordpress has become a over-convoluted behemoth, with a needlessly complex structure that is not overly extensible. It is a pain to develop for/with/around. I think everyone can appreciate the very tangible effect that Wordpress has had on the web. However, it is currently in the rather painful throws of a transition from blogging platform to CMS, and has been for quite some time. There are number of other reasons: - You want to avoid PHP. - You don't need most of the feature bloat that comes along with Wordpress. - You want to use Markdown. - You want to try something different.
- rocky1138 13y ago
  I love php. I also love developing Wordpress themes and plugins. I'm not sure you're making a convincing argument. Then again, Markdown would be neat to work with, but in the end I'd just rather use html if I need to markup something. And I do like trying new things.
  - grin 13y ago
    Plenty of ways to try Markdown within Wordpress: http://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/markdown http://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/markdown
  - kerryritter 13y ago
    Agreed. WordPress is hardly difficult to extend or build for.
  - hugofirth 13y ago
    I develop with PHP regularly and absolutely love the strides the community has been making with Composer, the PSRs & frameworks like Laravel. I have also built tooling, plugins & themes for wordpress. I personally found it to be a frustrating experience: like I had been lobbed back to the days of PHP 4 when I thought all the PHP haters might have had a point (I wish to be emphatic - I don't think this anymore). From a development perspective: - The "loop" is bad design - with no regard for separation of concerns and maintainability. - The lack of namespacing means you have to go through a dance, working around Wordpress's idiosyncratic structure, in order to build around Wordpress effectively. - I personally don't think much of their documentation.

nodata 13y ago

Anyone got a list of features? This page doesn't tell us much. Edit: http://www.ghost.org/features/ http://www.ghost.org/features/ Looks like markdown+looks stylish. Not sure what else.

moneyrich4 13y ago

been using this for a while things i've noticed so far (.3.0): - no dash yet - no view posts by category feature - no list top 10 most recent posts - kind of confusing or redundant mvc abstraction i hacked up a view posts by category and a template swap by hostURL in a few hours but the code is really abstracted. it will probably make sense later when all the features are implemented though. good: - easy to install - love the editor - love the admin - templates are handlebars and easy i've been following this for ~6 months now and am stoked to use it. congrats on your release. can we please have a CMS style feature were we can edit some static pages to go into our blogs! PLZ!

fit2rule 13y ago
Hey ... I've been playing with Ghost now for a few hours and wondering if you've gotten any new templates set up, or have tips for template tweaking? I'm a newcomer to bourbon and sass ..
- moneyrich4 13y ago
  yea ive made a few templates i recommend just copything the casper folder and renaming it. (content/themes/casper) make your own stylesheet and comment theirs out (it, styles, everything). theirs is screen.css. you can comment out the ghost included {{body_class}} and {{ghost_foot}} by changing them to {{!body_class}} and {{!ghost_foot}} after that its just 3 files, default.hbs which is a global template (so its like the html head body tags), and then they insert the body at {{body}} the body comes from index.hbs or post.hbs, which will be index.hbs: 6 article summaries in a list with a page at the bottom. and post.hbs which will just show 1 post. the data in the post and index hbs files (handlebars templates) has stuff like {{eachpost}} {{post}} which is all you really have to keep out of those files
- moneyrich4 13y ago
  whoops. dupe post.
dmackerman 13y ago
Looking at the client side code makes me wonder why people would ever use Backbone. It's so abstracted, mixes DOM manipulation into views. I should re-write it with Angular! :)

mrottenkolber 13y ago

I can't take anyone seriously who uses fonts to display icons (it doesn't work when you turn off foreign fonts!) Sadly, nowadays thats pretty much everyone. If you want me to care about you (apparently/marketwise you don't), then get your design right. Tip: Design is not looking pretty. Design is this question: Does it work?

rushabh 13y ago
I can't take anyone seriously who does not uses fonts to display icons, Turn off foreign fonts (?) maybe 0.001% of web users do that.
addedlovely 13y ago
Um, surely that is an edge case? I haven't disabled foreign fonts, and haven't had issues from any clients either? Are there any statistics on this? Fonts to display icons reduce HTTP overhead and scale, looking great on retina screens.
andyhmltn 13y ago
I think the case for supporting retina screens + very fast load times far outweighs the amount of users that turn off foreign fonts (it baffles me why you would)
teamonkey 13y ago
Why would you turn off foreign fonts? There are some very good reasons why you'd want icons in a font. For example, font rendering is well supported by all browsers and very configurable through CSS, and if the default font size is increased for accessibility reasons the icons can also scale.
hellweaver666 13y ago
Is disabling fonts the new disabling Javascript and/or HTML emails? Something done by overly paranoid uber-nerd types and completely ignored by 99% of typical users.
stephen_g 13y ago
I feel this is a lot like how people used to object to websites that required JavaScript because they had it switched off... If you're going to use the web at all, you're probably going to need to change your setup so icon fonts work, because it's only going to get more common.

aram 13y ago

It's great to see how Kickstarter helped also "stabilize" the development of Open Source software (another example is Django Migrations project [0] which has been discussed here a couple of times already). It helped Ghost provide something on a much higher and usable level than most other Open Source projects did, which should have positive impact on the user/community adoption. I'm speaking here about collaboration with Digital Ocean, Rackspace and Envato, as well as the marketing campaign by Kickstarter before this release. DOcean, RackSpace and Envato alone will generate pretty high traffic and build up the community, especially if Envato (with Tutsplus/Nettuts) starts doing something similar as for Laravel [1][2][3], and provide free developer introduction to the platform. Glad to see this, hope it will keep up the expectations. [0] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-migrations-for-django http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewgodwin/schema-migr... [1] http://laravel.com/ http://laravel.com/ [2] http://net.tutsplus.com/tag/laravel/ http://net.tutsplus.com/tag/laravel/ [3] https://tutsplus.com/course/laravel-essentials/ https://tutsplus.com/course/laravel-essentials/

BCM43 13y ago
I think it's the idea in general, not the specific platform. Joey Hess was able to successfully run his own crowdfunding campaign with custom written software. https://campaign.joeyh.name/ https://campaign.joeyh.name/
- aram 13y ago
  I agree about the crowdfunding idea; very often I find myself saying/attributing "Kickstarter" when I really mean "crowdfunding" :) Thanks for the Git-Annex link - didn't know he ran a campaign on his own after doing it on Kickstarter.

matteodepalo 13y ago

I really like the idea of having images for popular hosting providers like Digital Ocean and Rackspace; this should lower the entry level difficulty tremendously. I wish Discourse would do something similar, as I believe it would spread the adoption very quickly.

ridruejo 13y ago
You can use the BitNami installers to install them anywhere, including the hosting providers you mention. BitNami also supports Discourse
- matteodepalo 13y ago
  Wow I didn't know that, thank you!
yapcguy 13y ago
> Digital Ocean are one of the most popular VPS hosts in the world Where is the proof of this? Any hard data on customer account numbers or growth? There are lots of solid VPS providers out there. I don't see why Digital Ocean gets so much hype.
- pearkes 13y ago
  Currently, they are 21st in the world for web facing computers[1]. The growth has been pretty good, too. [1] http://trends.netcraft.com/www.digitalocean.com http://trends.netcraft.com/www.digitalocean.com
nickstinemates 13y ago
You can run discourse by issuing an command on any Linux host: https://index.docker.io/u/srid/discourse/ https://index.docker.io/u/srid/discourse/

eugeneross 13y ago

After briefly looking over documentation, it seems that Ghost doesn't support post types like links, asides, images, etc. Or did I overlook something? If else, future implementation?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

bachback 13y ago

Very, very interesting. There are a lot of to be announced in there, especially pricing. But as this is opensource I thank the creators of this and will hope to contribute.

calibwam 13y ago

Is the registering on ghost.org for hosting a blog on that page, or to obtain the prepackaged zip files the README at github talks about? In other words, to host ghost myself, do I need to register at ghost.org or do I have to clone the github repo?

pkrefta 13y ago
Registering is for hosting a blog. Code is available on Github.
zedpm 13y ago
Eventually you'll be able to their hosted service, but for now when you register you just get access to a source download for self-hosting and access to their forums.

Touche 13y ago

Browsed the code a little bit and my overall impressions are the while the code quality is good, it's a shame that it seems to be tightly coupled to doing a database as the backend. I was hoping to fork Ghost, or even better just provide a plugin for it, that uses static file creation instead of a db backend but looking at the code this looks like it's going to be a bit of work to do. I'll probably still do it but it would have been nice if the db stuff had been abstracted a little further out

Anonmattymous 13y ago
I completely agree, if you decide to do it and need any help PM me. With something lightweight like this it would definitely be a lot better with a simple file system instead of a whole database that you need to set up and deal with. I have done something similar before in PHP, but the Ghost front end is really nice.
- thecolorblue 13y ago
  Second on PM'ing for help. I have been interested in node.js CMS's and this has been the most promising one. I have not dug into the code yet.
  - 3825 13y ago
    How do I PM someone on hacker news?
    - cfontes 13y ago
      You don't. Maybe you can try looking into one profile.
      - thecolorblue 13y ago
        Yeah, my bad, I assumed you could. send me a message on twitter. @thecolorblue.
  - deleted 13y ago

mradmin 13y ago

I would recommend splitting out the monolithic Gruntfile.js into individual config and task files. It makes it easier to read, in my opinion. I've put together an example here: https://github.com/badsyntax/gruntfile https://github.com/badsyntax/gruntfile

davexunit 13y ago
Off topic, but someone please explain to me what Grunt does that is so special? It seems like it's re-inventing Make for no good reason.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

theklub 13y ago

Man, I was all excited for some open source ghosting software.

bencollier49 13y ago

Hmm, isn't this name caught by trademark law in the UK? Ghost is almost certainly a trademark of Symantec; wouldn't this fall into the same trademark category?

pkrefta 13y ago
Let's hope that there'll be no problems such as this and it'll solved in good spirit some day.
- bencollier49 13y ago
  We wouldn't want problems like this haunting the project in future.
  - phillc73 13y ago
    More likely it will be a specter over the entire project for years to come.
    - Macsenour 13y ago
      Booooooooo (But I laughed anyway)

stevoski 13y ago

A demonstration of how we (I?) judge projects and people via the wrong criteria; as I watched the video, this is what went through my mind: * "Oh, a New Zealand accent. One of us! I hope this is really awesome and I want to try this out already." * "Oh, he says he was in charge of WordPress interface design for two years. Using WordPress causes me pain. I expect this product to be painful."

jonahx 13y ago
I don't think anyone is invulnerable to this. The only (partial) salvation is to be aware of it, take it with a (big) grain of salt, and try to overcome it with factual reasoning when making decisions.
danso 13y ago
> "Oh, he says he was in charge of WordPress interface design for two years. Using WordPress causes me pain. I expect this product to be painful." Sadly, this is too common of a fallacy in judgment, and one that seems most non-fallacious on its face. But whether we want to admit it or not, sometimes output and achievements are highly impacted -- even dependent -- on the organization and institution than the individual. So someone highly successful at Apple retail, for example, may flounder at JCPenney's (http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/a-dose-of-realism-for-the-chief-of-j-c-penney/ http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/a-dose-of-realism-for...). So it goes both ways. It's wrong to argue that someone who was great at once place will necessarily be great at another. And conversely, someone who's work turned out awful at one place (either by poor management or design-by-committee), may flourish in different circumstances
wmeredith 13y ago
"Oh, he says he was in charge of WordPress interface design for two years. Using WordPress causes me pain. I expect this product to be painful." Wait, what? WordPress' backend may be a mess, but it's CMS interface is the only one I've ever trained a non-technical person on that they liked or seemed to be able to use right away. I worked at a marketing/dev shop for years and have probably trained 40-ish non-techy clients (usually small marketing teams of 3-4) on customized CMS installs. WordPress' dashboard was by far the best when it came to power/usability ratio.

xdite 13y ago

Try Logdown http://logdown.com/demo http://logdown.com/demo

girvo 13y ago

I'm really impressed with the buy-in they've got from other companies regarding it. I wonder how they achieved that.

spindritf 13y ago

What are the best practices for deploying a node.js app from git on Ubuntu behind nginx? I'm sure someone has a blog post on that but "Ghost" makes it a bit difficult to google for. In case anyone's looking, this PPA[1] seems to come recommended and has an up-to-date node. [1] https://launchpad.net/~chris-lea/+archive/node.js/ https://launchpad.net/~chris-lea/+archive/node.js/

hippich 13y ago
I am using Dokku
- andreypopp 13y ago
  Which in this case would make things a little more difficult cause Ghost uses SQLite and Dokku can't deploy apps which use it because of default Node.js Heroku buildpack which prohibits SQLite usage. You can patch a buildpack though. For example in my fork of Dokku I replaced Heroku buildpacks with plain Dockerfiles to define both a stack and a runtime dependencies — https://github.com/andreypopp/upaas https://github.com/andreypopp/upaas
- StavrosK 13y ago
  How are you liking it? It's very handy for launching apps, for sure, but I'm wondering how you can configure services (e.g. how do I set up redis persistence or nginx directives or postgres backups?).
NathanKP 13y ago
This is a good guide which explains the best technique I've found, and which I'm currently using in production for the startup I work for: http://blog.argteam.com/coding/hardening-node-js-for-production-part-3-zero-downtime-deployments-with-nginx/ http://blog.argteam.com/coding/hardening-node-js-for-product... Basically Nginx is used as a reverse proxy to serve requests from a pool of Node.js processes, each with its own internal port. So you would set up the Node.js app to run internally on ports 8080, 8081, 8082, and 8083 for example. (If you have a quad core server this assures that under extreme load each processor can be fully utilized by one single-thread Node.js process). Then Nginx serves requests on port 80 by fetching the response from one of those four internal ports in round robbin fashion. If one of the processes crashes due to a bug or you want to specifically restart it so that a new code update takes effect in production then Nginx will automatically remove it from the pool while it is down and then add it back when it comes back online. When you are pushing out code updates you can cycle each process one at a time to do a zero downtime deploy. The other cool thing that you can do with Nginx reverse proxies is use the proxy_cache as a robust cache layer to almost completely remove stress from your blog under high load. Honestly for a basic personal blog this technique probably isn't really necessary. You could just run it through Forever on port 80 with no Nginx and forget it, but if you expect tons of traffic, or if you want high 99% uptime, or if you just want to have some fun configuring a server then the technique I explained above is how you do it. It takes some fiddling to get Nginx configured properly and that tutorial I linked actually leaves out some details of the upstream server configuration but its pretty easy to figure out from the Nginx documentation.

sw00 13y ago

Anyone remember Specter? Very simple blogging engine with elasticsearch backend. http://brislink.github.io/specter/ http://brislink.github.io/specter/ I don't think it's out to replace Wordpress like Ghost is trying to do though.

dschiptsov 13y ago

Let's make predictions, at what amount of active users they will realize that NodeJS is a meaningless waste of resources and will try to migrate to something else?)

babby 13y ago
But it's not. I just launched a website that handles many taxing db queries over multiple pages and I'm able to achieve ~500 requests per second on a single worker with some simple memory caching. PHP is a waste of resources in the proper sense of the terminology, thus this Ghost stuff is fundamentally better.
- dschiptsov 13y ago
  Everything, even Rails, looks great compared to PHP.))
aram 13y ago
You forgot the close the </stupidity> tag, so it doesn't affect other members.
- dschiptsov 13y ago
  Oh, sure. Under this very tag I could mention that using JS outside a browser, especially on the apps that by its nature should be a tiny layer on top of an OS's services is an idea with, ironically, related to another great one - Desktop Java Apps, and both of there great ideas are somehow appear as an reflection of one another in a grotesque mirror. They never works as expected.) There is no justification of using any VM for an (cache-able) I/O bound apps. Why do they need nginx as a front-end if NodeJs so great?) Could the whole engine be implemented as a few nginx's modules using another ready modules?) Oh, sorry, I forgot to close the tag.
cjbprime 13y ago
I don't understand. As far I've seen, NodeJS is faster than Django/Rails in approximately every scenario, and that's a large part of the reason people are switching to it. So either you're confused about the relative performance of Node against the other most popular frameworks, or you dislike all of the most popular frameworks and have your own preference for a webapp that you're failing to mention, and that most people disagree with you on the merits of. Which is it?

termain 13y ago

I know that the hosting service is not the platform, but i found the terms of service to be a bit onerous. They require full legal names, for one and I don't understand this part: "you have, in the case of Content that includes computer code, accurately categorized and/or described the type, nature, uses and effects of the materials, whether requested to do so by Ghost Foundation or otherwise" There's also the combination of reserving the right to take down any content for any reason. That's fine for a free service, but unacceptable for a paid one, particularly one that claims that it needn't give refunds.

ElongatedTowel 13y ago

Well, I tried taking a look at it, but the setup is kind of funky. * [edit] Download link seems to have been fixed. * Cloned the repo instead and set everything up. Cloning the submodule for the theme didn't work due to some rights issue. Cloned it by hand then. * Setup was pretty easy otherwise, even though I'm using the development version. * [edit] Nevermind. You can signup without the mail sender beeing setup, just not recover the password it seems. Notifications per mail are also disabled. Should have read more carefully. * No direct link to the interface on the blog index (or am I blind?). Have to add /ghost by hand. * Rest seems pretty nice, though barebone. No comment system, why? The only benefit to static blogs that is left is the online editor.

rmrfrmrf 13y ago
I just downloaded the Bitnami stack instead of going through the login process. Bitnami seems to have added some bloat to themselves, however: they used to provide you with a straight VM image; now they have an installer and what seems to be a self-contained VM. The cynical part of me assumes that something in this stack is phoning home and perhaps making me part of some evil botnet, but hopefully not ;).
- ElongatedTowel 13y ago
  While signing up is mentioned several times on their page it doesn't seem to be required in any way to run your own version. I hope the broken download is just a bug. Signing up just so you can download the package would be pretty annoying.
  - rmrfrmrf 13y ago
    Oh, I just figured that sign-up was required from reading the copy: > Open Signup on Ghost.org The most important piece of news, of course, is that Ghost.org is now open for signups from everybody. Get over there, create your account, grab your username, download Ghost, and check out the forums. The top comment only confirmed my suspicions.
fit2rule 13y ago

NKCSS 13y ago

Trying to install it fails on sqlite3 for me (Windows 8). Too bad; wanted to check it out quickly, but if the firs thing you do starts throwing errors, I'm not really tempted to continue fiddling. 15923 error sqlite3@2.1.16 install: `node build.js` 15923 error `cmd "/c" "node build.js"` failed with 1 15924 error Failed at the sqlite3@2.1.16 install script. 15924 error This is most likely a problem with the sqlite3 package, 15924 error not with npm itself. 15924 error Tell the author that this fails on your system: 15924 error node build.js 15924 error You can get their info via: 15924 error npm owner ls sqlite3 15924 error There is likely additional logging output above. 15925 error System Windows_NT 6.2.9200 15926 error command "C:\\Program Files\\nodejs\\\\node.exe" "C:\\Program Files\\nodejs\\node_modules\\npm\\bin\\npm-cli.js" "install" "--production" 15927 error cwd C:\Users\Nick\Downloads\ghost-0.3.2 15928 error node -v v0.8.16 15929 error npm -v 1.1.69 15930 error code ELIFECYCLE 15931 verbose exit [ 1, true ]

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
spleeder 13y ago
Update Node to the latest stable version and you should have no more problems.
- NKCSS 13y ago
  That did the trick :) Might be good to add some pre-condition where you tell the user to update to a supported version of node before attempting to install :)

yankoff 13y ago

How people find energy to create yet another blogging platform.

zenmaker 13y ago

What's so fascinating about the momentum that gathered behind Ghost and it's funding campaign was that they selling the feature-set in part, but maybe in even larger part, the fact that it wasn't WP. My sense was that people backed it as much out of a sense of "sending a message to David" as they did wanting something better.

kh_hk 13y ago

I've been looking forward to this release. Not because I want the blogging platform, but to take a look. In the node world, it's easy to find reference code on libraries and modules, but I always fail to find a source of some practices further developed than todo lists. It is not about the code (which as far as I have looked is Ok), but about tying technologies and practices together. Here, we got a node express backend with handlebars as the templating engine, defined grunt tasks, some unit tests and backbone on the client. I am really looking forward to keep diving as the project progresses!

2mur 13y ago
Check out issacs npm-www[0] too. I found it helpful for trying to learn how to get things done sans express. [0] https://github.com/isaacs/npm-www https://github.com/isaacs/npm-www
- babby 13y ago
  I used this a bit :). I think everyone should make their own frameworks from scratch so they know exactly how it all works. By the end of it you might, like me, just continue with your own framework (when you can of course).
59nadir 13y ago
> Here, we got a node express backend with handlebars as the templating engine, defined grunt tasks, some unit tests and backbone on the client. JS BINGO! Sorry, I couldn't resist. I'm something inbetween disgusted and amused by this soup of JS libraries and buzz words. I feel like I'm gonna vomit while laughing.
- kh_hk 13y ago
  Yes, libraries have names. Names are meant to represent and be used to refer to these libraries. The same could apply to any web project in any language: Here, we got a python flask backend with mustache as the templating engine, defined fabric tasks, some unit tests and backbone on the client. CPU sensitive tasks are handled by Celery or RQ, on Redis or RabbitHQ. Maybe you would prefer: Here, we got <Insert your language here> , with no templates, some bash scripts to build the project, no unit tests and a half-assed mess of javascript spaghetti code tied together on the client. I must ask, if you do build websites, how do you (or if you do): - Use a framework - Use templates - Minify and build assets - Test your code It's been many years since we have moved from frameworks that do everything, to small libraries that do one thing and to it well, sometimes opinionated or not. For me, choice is better. It is always a good pass time to look how people build their projects, compare it on how you are doing it, and decide if you can learn something from that. I might be wasting my time, and your comment was just an opportunity to bash on a language or community. I could not care less, as I have no cards on this game. Just use whatever works for you.

AhtiK 13y ago

Is there a caching layer built in or how does it make sense to create a blogging platform with the performance of NodeJS?

postfuturist 13y ago

> No one expects an app written for OSX 10.4 Tiger to work on OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion. That's truly sad.

danso 13y ago
Why is that? I think you're misled by OSX's numbering system, which uses .x where other operating systems might use whole numbers. In fact, I misestimated myself...I thought each dot-version represented a year, with Tiger being 4 years old. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger However, Tiger is actually 8 years old. I don't think obsolesence in eight years is too horrible.

camus 13y ago

Congratulations to Ghost,i'm sure it will be a successfull plateform , and nodejs has interesting capabilities (socket.io,great libraries).It could become a serious Wordpress competitor indeed.

Finster 13y ago

Will Symantec's trademark lawyers be a threat here?

guynamedloren 13y ago

Possibly a silly question, but can a non-profit get acquired? If so, how does that work?

philliphaydon 13y ago

Meh, database, pass. I liked the idea of Jekyll of writing markdown and compiling it to static HTML so I wrote Snow to see if it was possible in .NET, now just refactoring and adding features. Markdown and Static files for a blog is the way to go.

madradavid 13y ago

After 30 minutes all i can say is Build failed [sqlite3]: 1 npm ERR! weird error 1 npm ERR! not ok code 0

leke 13y ago

I've installed ghost to my raspberry pi and have... > ghost@0.3.2 start /var/www/servers/www..dyndns.org/pages/ghost > node index Ghost is running... Listening on 127.0.0.1:2368 Url configured as: http://my-ghost-blog.com http://my-ghost-blog.com Ctrl+C to shut down 127.0.0.1:2368 gives me an unable to establish a connection error (btw, I'm ssh-ing into my pi on the lan). and also 127.0.0.1:2368/ghost where I am meant to access my admin account setup. Any idea what went wrong?

leke 13y ago
If anyone finds this on google, and is having the same problem... Because I was ssh-ing into the pi, in the config file, I had to change the localhost address to my pi's address on the lan. Then access it via that lan address with the suggested port.

lambda 13y ago

Taking a look at their "idea" page, I found myself nodding along with most of their bullet points (or shrugging and saying "not exactly my preference, but I can see why you'd want that"), until I hit: Ghost would have cut-off points with major versions, allowing core developers to remove old code from the codebase and evolve the platform to allow it to improve. No one expects an app written for OSX 10.4 Tiger to work on OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion. Oh, hell no. Backwards compatibility is way more important than some shiny new feature. When I upgrade my software, I expect it to work better, not break. If I have a working plugin from 5 years ago, why should I have to fight with some pointless API redesign just to get it to work again? In the real world, people need compatibility more than they need whatever cleanup you're able to do by breaking compatibility. Heck, in many cases you can get both by doing your rewrite but leaving a compatibility layer on top that gives you the compatibility that you need. I'm so sick of trendy "modern" frameworks like Rails that break compatibility every 5 minutes, and listing breaking compatibility as a major feature is a huge turnoff. How about focusing on spending the pre-1.0 releases iterating and designing a really good API that will be amenable to backwards compatible extensions, and then sticking to that API and backwards compatible extensions to it for the forseeable future?

karolisd 13y ago
Especially for a young project, I think this is ok. You don't want it to be set in stone too early. Once there is an established ecosystem around Ghost, there will be a lot more pressure to keep it stable.
- benologist 13y ago
  Even better than that is pressure to keep addons/plugins/whatever up to date. I think there's some good precedence for that with Firefox who (still?) deliberately broke all their extension compatibilities on every release, and contrary to that Wordpress who've led to a fully automated exploit ecosystem.
  - jeffreyjflim 13y ago
    I don't know about Firefox doing that on purpose, but the addon that I've written (Link Exposé) has seen several releases of firefox (19.* to 24.*) without having to do an (api) "update". It's written using the new jetpack SDK (now "Add-on SDK") - and there is a commitment to keeping that api stable.

nickstinemates 13y ago

It took a bit of effort as the code is unstable, but I've managed to create a pretty interesting Dockerfile[1]. Just run a git clone, git submodule init, and then docker build from within that directory. That will then allow you to have an instance to test and play around with. I also have an instance up and running[2] if you want to play with it. Messing it up doesn't matter to me as I will just docker run a new one. Have fun. Username: nstinemates@gmail.com Password: demodemodemo 1: https://github.com/keeb/Ghost/blob/add-dockerfile/Dockerfile https://github.com/keeb/Ghost/blob/add-dockerfile/Dockerfile 2: http://stinemat.es:49429/ghost/ http://stinemat.es:49429/ghost/ edit: One of you lovely gentle souls decided to change the demo password. Thanks for making me have to `docker stop` then `docker run` a new one and inconveniencing me for all of 2 seconds. Link updated.

illyism 13y ago
Using "nick" as username gives me: "invalid e-mail".
- nickstinemates 13y ago
  ah - nstinemates@gmail.com is the login then. I'll edit.
mrjatx 13y ago
Seems like they changed it again
- nickstinemates 13y ago
  Oh well. At this point I'll just point to the Dockerfile and say run that :) It takes less than a minute! Or if you want a private instance I will make no guarantees about just send me a note. I'll be happy to provide it on a subdomain of your chosing.

andybak 13y ago

I always felt node.js needed a Rails or a Django before it needed a layer on top of that. i.e. a content-oriented MV-whatever framework. By my understanding node.js is rather low-level to be a good platform for content-driven sites. Is this inaccurate?

beshrkayali 13y ago

"too many blogging platforms, not that many quality content providers."

officialjunk 13y ago

anyone do a security audit?

lobo_tuerto 13y ago

A link from the project's homepage to the source code in github would be great.

adamtulinius 13y ago

Warning; the zip-file explodes into a mess, make sure to extract it into a directory (unzip -d ghost-0.3.2 ghost-0.3.2.zip).

tonilin 13y ago

I see many user have some hard time setting up the Node.js / npm environment before being able to get Ghost up and running. I would expect the editor of Logdown much better to use. It reads Github Flavored Markdown, has code highlighting, drag & drop image upload. And it's an online service, so you don't need to deal with the server stuffs. Much easier to use. http://logdown.com/demo http://logdown.com/demo

dingdingdang 13y ago

What is it with web pages / blogs and their wild tendencies with using 18px+ fonts for the body text? I can read something like a third of the text off the screen as compared to for an example HN?! Ridiculous that I have to be habituated to using the zoom feature in Firefox to simply read a page instead of looking at one and a half paragraph like is the case on Ghost.org