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Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.

30 points by 500and4 13y ago

nodata 13y ago
For a blog? I thought people used Wordpress as a CMS these days.
- 500and4 13y ago
  I think there are still plenty of plain old blogs out there using wordpress. It's a great CMS but lousy at being a lightweight blogging platform.
  - davidgerard 13y ago
    It's not the greatest. And running it locally is fraught, because of Security Hole of the Week. For almost everyone running WordPress, the right answer is wordpress.com. If you really need a custom theme, you might need to host somewhere else or self-host. (I self-host my own WP blogs, but that's because I'm a control addict.)
    - rmccue 13y ago
      > And running it locally is fraught, because of Security Hole of the Week. We had 4 security releases in 2013: http://wordpress.org/news/category/security/ http://wordpress.org/news/category/security/ Not quite Hole of the Week, but admittedly not the best record. When you have a codebase this big, it's not that surprising though.
      - davidgerard 13y ago
        Sorry, I don't mean to impugn your efforts :-) WordPress is a wonderful thing and I'm a big fan. As PHP goes, WordPress is as good as it gets. But as a sysadmin, I've found it a goddamn PITA keeping up with stuff in a professional "oh no we must run everything through staging and testing" environment. So we fobbed it off to a hosting company. If we didn't require custom themes, we'd have just put the blogs on wordpress.com on a commercial basis.
  - johnward 13y ago
    It's not lousy at being a blogging platform. It's feature heavy but you just ignore the features and blog.
davodesign84 13y ago
I used to love WordPress. Now is too feature heavy for a blog and not flexible enough as a CMS (without a lot of customisation)..I might give Ghost a try, feels a lot like Medium. How about the SEO though?
- kn8 13y ago
  SEO is fine. More info here http://www.metacotta.com/ghost-seo/ http://www.metacotta.com/ghost-seo/
  - ntrepid8 13y ago
    How does Ghost generate pages for web crawlers? This has always been my hesitation about this sort of platform. Does it pre-render static pages? Or is everything rendered on the server in NodeJS?
    - kn8 13y ago
      It's generated on the server in Node, so no different than what PHP does in case of Wordpress in this aspect.
  - arbuge 13y ago
    Interesting read. Last year I wrote a simple blogging platform in PHP myself, in about a week, rather than go through the trouble of integrating Wordpress with the rest of my PHP site. I sometimes wondered how SEO-optimized the result was compared to a full-blown WP install. Feels good to see that I hit all the recommendations in this article... I guess my effort is at least about as good as Ghost then, if not WP.
jbeja 13y ago
I like Wordpress. I make a post and is published to the web that all i need. Thank you.
rexreed 13y ago
Love Wordpress - the fact that it's more than just a blog is why I use it. If I were to just blog nowadays, I'd prefer a static site generator using Markdown above everything else.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
Thiz 13y ago
Wordpress is free. What's not to love?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
Orangeair 13y ago
Given that the author goes on to condemn Wordpress as overly feature-heavy and too complicated for most users, I don't feel like 'adorable' is the right word there. At any rate, this platform looks awesome. Markdown editing with live-previewing? Sounds like a dream come true for anyone who just wants to write words and put them on the Internet.
- johnward 13y ago
  People who want to just write words don't necessarily want to learn/use markdown though.
jccalhoun 13y ago
I'd rather use wordpress than yet another blogging platform that gives you a narrow strip of text in the middle with 2/3 of the screen being empty space.
- kevincennis 13y ago
  That's a theme issue. It has nothing to do with the platform at all.
- oddevan 13y ago
  Be fair; the default WordPress theme does that too. :)
spindritf 13y ago
I think Ghost is absolutely awesome. It's slick, it has potential, there's a lot of enthusiasm for it. I have been running an instance since the first public release. There is no comparison between it and Wordpress though. The former is a neat new product while the latter is a full-blown CMS, with every SEO optimization one can think of, plethora of plugins and themes, and vast knowledge base, even if in the form of random blog and forum posts. Ghost doesn't even support analytics and comments natively. Plugins (apps?) are a planned feature! Not to mention that instead of copying the files over to any webhost and pointing to your MySQL, like you would with Wordpress, to use Ghost you need to install node, install Ghost's dependencies, configure and run supervisord, configure the webserver, and only then start Ghost. At which point you will be confused by its testing and production modes. Personally, I like it that way. Run an app, point nginx to it, done. You can add caching and ssl effortlessly on top of that without interfering with the application itself. But most people don't consider server administration a viable hobby.
- d23 13y ago
  > But most people don't consider server administration a viable hobby. It depresses me how much trouble I had empathizing with this.
- ezequiel-garzon 13y ago
  Thanks for such an insightful comment. Out of curiosity, in what way is WordPress optimized for SEO? Is it the URL structure? Isn't the actual content what matters the most?
  - tim333 13y ago
    It's got free tools like http://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ http://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
wayanon 13y ago
Unless you self-host the minimum cost is $5/mo covering 10,000 views. Cheap but not free.
- tim333 13y ago
  I was thinking that - not even terribly cheap if you are the average blogger just being read by an handful of friends and acquaintances. That shouldn't cost $60/yr. The equivalent at Wordpress costs $0.
alagappanr 13y ago
IMO Wordpress has grown to include something for everybody. It irks me a bit when people say it is feature heavy for simple blogging. You write a blog post and publish it to the web. Yes, you can do just that and ignore the other features. It is easily stretchable in the future when you decide to do more with it.
unicornporn 13y ago
He's making it sound really easy. The reason many people end up using WP for their self hosted blog is that it runs on just about every shared hosting in the world. Ghost really doesn't – because it uses Node. Switching hosting provider (often to a more expensive one) is more trouble and sacrifice than most people like to go through. Because, for those who are really just interested in writing, the blogging software isn't very important at all. It is where you write your texts and you publish them. Being anal about blogging software is, after all, an occupation for the tech geeks who like to obsess about details. You know those who often have 7 posts on their blog in total. Like the author of this blog post... And me.
- robodale 13y ago
  This post was relevant to me, because I was just opening a new account on my hosting provider today, and installing WordPress of course for just the reasons laid out. I don't care about anything, other than getting my article on my site so my customers can see it....and they don't care about anything other than the fact my article needs to be there.
- debacle 13y ago
  > it it runs on just about every shared hosting in the world. Even more to your point, most hosts either provide WordPress installations out of the box or provide some sort of 1 click install via cPanel. For a non-technical user, that's great ease of use.
facepalm 13y ago
I don't like using wordpress because of PHP and security issues. It never occurred to me that I should stop using it because it is too complicated to use. I've tried to find alternatives but I've failed. Now I am looking into hosting my blogs somewhere where hacking won't hurt my other data. The effort to maintain some other solution is too high for me.
Doctor_Fegg 13y ago
"spectacular hubris that's somewhere between laughable and profoundly obnoxious" Confucius say, man who writes sneery headline about "that's adorable" not best placed to criticise others for being obnoxious.
- 500and4 13y ago
  As the author of the article I was a bit wary of the title. And in retrospect not only are you exactly right but it doesn't really reflect the tone of the article or how I actually feel. A bad choice on my part that's made me look a bit of an arse. I shall be more careful in future!
CalRobert 13y ago
I actually have a hard time imagining why I'd use Wordpress anymore. If I want a blog, I'll probably use Ghost. If I want a CMS, I find django-CMS to be pretty awesome (I'm biased because I had to learn Django for a job, though). Wordpress seems like a PITA to work with, though to its credit it has an enormous ecosystem around it.
- CalRobert 13y ago
  Sheesh if you're going to downvote me you could at least say why.
  - josefresco 13y ago
    I didn't down-vote you but I would venture that it's this comment "Wordpress seems like a PITA to work with" Sounds like you don't have any actual experience with WordPress which means it's probably not fair for you to say it's a "pain in the ass" when you're favoring the platform you use simply because it's the one familiar to you. Also it doesn't seem as though you have exp with Ghost either. HNers are a harsh audience.
    - CalRobert 13y ago
      OK, Wordpress seems _to me_ like a PITA to work with. I spent some time working on Wordpress a couple of years ago when I was doing work for a company that purchased a Wordpress-driven site. For other people it may well be a wonderful tool.
aaronbasssett 13y ago
"wordpress is an unauthenticated remote shell that, as a useful side feature, also contains a blog" - http://www.bash.org/?949214= http://www.bash.org/?949214=
nhangen 13y ago
I use WordPress because it has a set of hooks/filters/APIs that make it incredibly easy to build themes and plugins. However, I'm annoyed by the 'money is evil' socialist sentiment that pervades much of the community, and as cool as Matt might be, he's quick to demonize people/companies that differ from him philosophically. Because of that, I would be happy to start building for Ghost too. I'm just waiting for a more robust API, or at least a bit more info on how to develop for it.
sushijain 13y ago
"Wordpress is now a maddeningly complicated CMS and not a blogging platform." Wha? Complicated? Said no one ever.
sushijain 13y ago
"Wordpress is now a maddeningly complicated CMS and not a blogging platform." Wha? Complicated? Said no one ever.
serf 13y ago
Oh, you still use [very popular tech that I no longer use, and is now somehow inferior because of new alternatives I have since found] ? That's adorable.
pknight 13y ago
It just blows my mind that some folks are condescending toward running WP over running a light weight solution with a vastly inferior range of functionality. If you want to publish a series of texts with only a minimum of requirements, sure there a dozens of solutions that could do the job. Publishing snippets of text is easy, no big deal. Serious bloggers might like to have a commenting system, a taxonomy system, a widgets system, an rss feed, a user account system, a way to serve their content in more than one way. You know, typical blog stuff. Ghost is not an alternative to WP, nor are any of the other barebones solutions. Doesn't mean they are not awesome in their own right. It's just the comparison with WP has to stop, because it's like comparing an analogue typewriter to a word processor. Both can comfortably print words, but that's where the comparison ends. You can fetishize simple solutions without having to hate on solutions that aren't even remotely similar in design. And there's also this weird logic behind how people should pick their blogging engine. People don't choose WordPress because they aspire to use only what is written in the most fashionable language or coded by the most popular of programming methodologies, or because of some evolved affection for minimal solutions. They pick it because it has a great community and because it is open source, it's easy to use, it's totally free, you have countless people that can help you, it does a lot of stuff and because you can easily extend it in a countless ways.
josefresco 13y ago
How about "Oh you think you can build a blogging platform that competes with WordPress? How adorable." I find it funny that WordPress was criticized for being a crappy CMS and when it became a decent CMS people criticized it for being a bloated blogging platform. I also find it humorous that seemingly every 20-something rockstar-ninja-startup founder/developer thinks they can write a "better blogging platform" yet I don't see any traction in the real world.
joshvm 13y ago
For some inexplicable reason, the actual download link is hidden on the page: https://ghost.org/download/ https://ghost.org/download/ or their GitHub: https://github.com/tryghost/ghost/ https://github.com/tryghost/ghost/ Looks pretty! As an aside, about Wordpress, there are a couple of important points: 1) The famous install - it's extremely simple, anyone can do it if they have MySQL set up. Even easier if your hoster has CPanel. Ghost requires either hosting on their systems or your own server running Node. The latter is not an option for many customers, the majority of bloggers are _not_ web savvy. 2) Plugins, themes and knowledgebase, pretty damn good. However, like any app store there's a lot of rubbish and it's often hard to tell which plugin you really want. Not to mention you can make Wordpress do virtually anything you want with the right theme. 3) Security. Wordpress is a mire for this. I don't have a well known blog, but I still got hammered by script kiddies trying to upload malicious files, attempting to access restricted directories, etc. Ultimately this is the problem, Wordpress is a fantastic platform, but it requires constant maintenance to make sure that nothing is insecure. This is not a problem if you're a full time blogger, or you're running a profitable website that needs that kind of flexibility. However, for someone who doesn't blog that often and doesn't want this overhead, Wordpress is just too much. I now use a static generator (Octopress) because I can't be bothered with updating all the time, knowing that if I forget, my site is likely to get hacked. It was fairly easy to add support for mathtex too. This plus a hand coded static site for other content is all I need. I don't need any databases, everything is nice and low bandwidth and it's trivial to manage everything with git. Thank god for rake watch!
- baudehlo 13y ago
  Before CPanel supported wordpress the installation was just as complex for WP as it is now for Ghost. You had to know how to install PHP and Apache and MySQL. All that changes over time as things get more popular.
homersapien 13y ago
Ghost: the super simple minimal blogging platform that requires considerable server experience to setup. Plus you get to write everything in Markdown! What's not to love?
secstate 13y ago
Oh, you're still dumping your own content on someone else's server and hoping they stay in business long enough for your URLs to benefit from the longtail? That's adorable. Wordpress and Ghost are not in the same league. If I'm going to go the trouble of npm installing all the Ghost dependencies, I'm going to use Jeykll or Octopress to statically build my pages of text with snippets. Then I reap the benefits of static pages and easily portable hosting (just dump the static files somewhere, anywhere and folks can read them).
josteink 13y ago
Am I the only one find the landing page for Ghost[1] hilarious? It shows in big fonts, and I quote "Free. Open". And it's written over a background featuring an iPad. An Ipad goddamnit! To market free & open they employ least free and open device on the planet, created by a company with a regular habbit of abusing software-patents, with co-ownerships in several patent-troll corporations to top it off. It may be a decent product, I don't know. But c'mon! If you're going to try to sell me free and open, how about not endorsing patent-trolls while doing so? [1] https://ghost.org/features/ https://ghost.org/features/
pron 13y ago
OK, so after seeing this blog post I took a few minutes, installed Ghost, and tried it. Looks very nice, but obviously directed towards absolute beginners. It's like a pretty Blogger. I've recently started using Jekyll as a blogging platform. It is not exactly for complete noobs, but doesn't require much expertise either; it has a nice and shallow learning curve. Hosting is either free (on GitHub) or very cheap (on S3), the site is extremely fast, and it's got plugins that pack a lot of power. And if you want an online editing UI, there's prose.io that directly integrates with GitHub, and is very pretty, too. So I'm very happy with Jekyll, but for a first time blogger that wants a nice theme I could recommend ghost.
vezzy-fnord 13y ago
The smug hipster arrogance displayed here is simply pathetic. This is an overly prideful magpie gone wrong.
vkb 13y ago
I have been blogging for 6+ years, using Wordpress exclusively. When I started,I was able to get installed, up-to-speed, and adding new themes, tweaking CSS/HTML, and even PHP pretty quickly. Like many, I got tired of constant upgrades, theme management, bloat, etc. Mostly, I was tired that new Wordpress themes were being developed mainly for marketers. I'm a writer. I care about my content being seen on its own merit, not whether the theme has SEO capabilities and carousels. So, I decided to donate to Ghost and give it a try when it came out. Competition is always good. I wasn't technical when I got started with Wordpress, but I am now. I never had issues installing Wordpress. Installing Ghost a couple months back, however, I just gave up. Let me outline the process from a writer's perspective: 1. Ooo. Ghost looks so pretty and so clean for my content. I'd love to have this and get rid of the fifteen different menus there are on Wordpress. 2. goes to installation instructions from Ghost team [1]. "Running Ghost locally on your computer is straight forward, but requires that you install Node.js first." What's Node.js, and why do I, as an end-user, care? Ok. It's some Javascript thing I've been hearing about. That's cool, I guess. It doesn't really matter to me, as long as it looks cool and is easy to write with. So how do I actually install this thing? 3. "I want to install Ghost on:" Mac | Windows | Linux. Huh? I thought this went on my web server somewhere? Like Wordpress does? 4. Ah, ok, here we go: "If you've already decided to deploy Ghost to your server or hosting account, that's great news! The following documentation will walk you through various options for deploying Ghost, from manual setups, to one-click installers." 5. "Manual Setup" Ok, here we go. "You're going to need a hosting package that already has, or will allow you to install Node.js. This means something like a cloud (Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, Rackspace Cloud), VPS (Webfaction, Dreamhost) or other package that has SSH (terminal) access & will allow you to install Node.js" What? What is all this stuff? How do I know whether my webhost will allow me to install Node.js? Do I need to switch to DigitalOcean? 6. I know enough command line to be dangerous, but not sure about all of this stuff. Make Ghost run forever? Why do I have to worry about it stopping running? Is it that different from Wordpress? 7. The init script? Is that finally what I have to do to...oh well, forget it. I've already been Googling stuff for 20 minutes to make sure I understand. This is just too much to take in. I just want to write stuff! Maybe I'll try it again when they have a new release out. Back to Wordpress. Ghost has the potential to be good, but it is just way, way too complicated for the average writer to stop using Wordpress, for now. Or, it's not complicated, and the set-up instructions are written for developers who want to sometimes write, instead of content-creators who might want to experiment with something new. That should change in time. Technologies always trickle down. But for now, yes, I still use Wordpress for my blog, and it might be adorable, but for me, I'm loyal to things that get out of my way and let me do my thing, and Wordpress just does. [1] http://docs.ghost.org/installation/ http://docs.ghost.org/installation/
aleem 13y ago
I like Ghost, I have been watching it closely and rooting for it. However, it just had a bunch of nasty issues that made it frustrating to put up with. I last checked a month or so back and these are the ones I remember off-hand: - Undo/redo is badly broken. If you add an image via ![] there was no undoing beyond that point. Undo was broken in a few other ways too. - Browser spellcheck didn't work. This was a big one for me and for anyone who writes a lot. - The preview doesn't correctly sync with the markdown editor if you add a bunch of images. This got very frustrating because the auto-sync sometimes rendered the preview-pane useless. I can't fathom there isn't a manual override until this gets fixed. It forces the writers to contend with a bug (that still exists) each time they edit a post with images. If you build your blogging platform on top of Markdown you should be ready to work within it's bounds (you can't align images) or let the community write MD extensions (leading to fragmentation and something that will eventually not be MD). Or the third alternative is to have a new flavour (ala GFM) that's maintained by the Ghost team itself with very minor modifications. In light of that, I would really propose the following amendments: - Markdown doesn't align images. That's a severe limitation. - Markdown still sucks at linked images. Try telling a novice to write: [![]()]() At least I think that's what it is. This is an issue with markdown but I think Ghost should take a few liberties as a favour to the rest of us. - For image alignments, I would propose the following: ![ center aligned ](link) ![left aligned ](link) ![ right aligned](link) ![ right aligned squeezed](link) ![ right aligned squeezed more](link) ... - And for linked images and images/links in general I would propose: ![](image-link) ![caption](image-link)(href-link) ![caption](image-link)[alt](href-link) !(image-link)(href-link) !(image-link)
Daviey 13y ago
I'm wondering what they were thinking calling it Ghost. Massively difficult to Google, where Wordpress wins hands down!
syntaxfree 13y ago
Is inline LateX available in a free Ghost host akin to Wordpress.com?
wonderzombie 13y ago
It looks great, but I don't have nor do I want to pay extra for a VPS just so I can install Node, of all things. Contrariwise my host supports installing Wordpress with a single click. The End. This post is just more tech hipsterism. I say this as someone who does indulge in PHP bashing from time to time, and who would like to switch from Wordpress.

30 points by 500and4 13y ago

nodata 13y ago

For a blog? I thought people used Wordpress as a CMS these days.

500and4 13y ago
I think there are still plenty of plain old blogs out there using wordpress. It's a great CMS but lousy at being a lightweight blogging platform.
- davidgerard 13y ago
  It's not the greatest. And running it locally is fraught, because of Security Hole of the Week. For almost everyone running WordPress, the right answer is wordpress.com. If you really need a custom theme, you might need to host somewhere else or self-host. (I self-host my own WP blogs, but that's because I'm a control addict.)
  - rmccue 13y ago
    > And running it locally is fraught, because of Security Hole of the Week. We had 4 security releases in 2013: http://wordpress.org/news/category/security/ http://wordpress.org/news/category/security/ Not quite Hole of the Week, but admittedly not the best record. When you have a codebase this big, it's not that surprising though.
    - davidgerard 13y ago
      Sorry, I don't mean to impugn your efforts :-) WordPress is a wonderful thing and I'm a big fan. As PHP goes, WordPress is as good as it gets. But as a sysadmin, I've found it a goddamn PITA keeping up with stuff in a professional "oh no we must run everything through staging and testing" environment. So we fobbed it off to a hosting company. If we didn't require custom themes, we'd have just put the blogs on wordpress.com on a commercial basis.
- johnward 13y ago
  It's not lousy at being a blogging platform. It's feature heavy but you just ignore the features and blog.

davodesign84 13y ago

I used to love WordPress. Now is too feature heavy for a blog and not flexible enough as a CMS (without a lot of customisation)..I might give Ghost a try, feels a lot like Medium. How about the SEO though?

kn8 13y ago
SEO is fine. More info here http://www.metacotta.com/ghost-seo/ http://www.metacotta.com/ghost-seo/
- ntrepid8 13y ago
  How does Ghost generate pages for web crawlers? This has always been my hesitation about this sort of platform. Does it pre-render static pages? Or is everything rendered on the server in NodeJS?
  - kn8 13y ago
    It's generated on the server in Node, so no different than what PHP does in case of Wordpress in this aspect.
- arbuge 13y ago
  Interesting read. Last year I wrote a simple blogging platform in PHP myself, in about a week, rather than go through the trouble of integrating Wordpress with the rest of my PHP site. I sometimes wondered how SEO-optimized the result was compared to a full-blown WP install. Feels good to see that I hit all the recommendations in this article... I guess my effort is at least about as good as Ghost then, if not WP.

jbeja 13y ago

I like Wordpress. I make a post and is published to the web that all i need. Thank you.

rexreed 13y ago

Love Wordpress - the fact that it's more than just a blog is why I use it. If I were to just blog nowadays, I'd prefer a static site generator using Markdown above everything else.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

Thiz 13y ago

Wordpress is free. What's not to love?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

Orangeair 13y ago

Given that the author goes on to condemn Wordpress as overly feature-heavy and too complicated for most users, I don't feel like 'adorable' is the right word there. At any rate, this platform looks awesome. Markdown editing with live-previewing? Sounds like a dream come true for anyone who just wants to write words and put them on the Internet.

johnward 13y ago
People who want to just write words don't necessarily want to learn/use markdown though.

jccalhoun 13y ago

I'd rather use wordpress than yet another blogging platform that gives you a narrow strip of text in the middle with 2/3 of the screen being empty space.

kevincennis 13y ago
That's a theme issue. It has nothing to do with the platform at all.
oddevan 13y ago
Be fair; the default WordPress theme does that too. :)

spindritf 13y ago

I think Ghost is absolutely awesome. It's slick, it has potential, there's a lot of enthusiasm for it. I have been running an instance since the first public release. There is no comparison between it and Wordpress though. The former is a neat new product while the latter is a full-blown CMS, with every SEO optimization one can think of, plethora of plugins and themes, and vast knowledge base, even if in the form of random blog and forum posts. Ghost doesn't even support analytics and comments natively. Plugins (apps?) are a planned feature! Not to mention that instead of copying the files over to any webhost and pointing to your MySQL, like you would with Wordpress, to use Ghost you need to install node, install Ghost's dependencies, configure and run supervisord, configure the webserver, and only then start Ghost. At which point you will be confused by its testing and production modes. Personally, I like it that way. Run an app, point nginx to it, done. You can add caching and ssl effortlessly on top of that without interfering with the application itself. But most people don't consider server administration a viable hobby.

d23 13y ago
> But most people don't consider server administration a viable hobby. It depresses me how much trouble I had empathizing with this.
ezequiel-garzon 13y ago
Thanks for such an insightful comment. Out of curiosity, in what way is WordPress optimized for SEO? Is it the URL structure? Isn't the actual content what matters the most?
- tim333 13y ago
  It's got free tools like http://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/ http://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

wayanon 13y ago

Unless you self-host the minimum cost is $5/mo covering 10,000 views. Cheap but not free.

tim333 13y ago
I was thinking that - not even terribly cheap if you are the average blogger just being read by an handful of friends and acquaintances. That shouldn't cost $60/yr. The equivalent at Wordpress costs $0.

alagappanr 13y ago

IMO Wordpress has grown to include something for everybody. It irks me a bit when people say it is feature heavy for simple blogging. You write a blog post and publish it to the web. Yes, you can do just that and ignore the other features. It is easily stretchable in the future when you decide to do more with it.

unicornporn 13y ago

He's making it sound really easy. The reason many people end up using WP for their self hosted blog is that it runs on just about every shared hosting in the world. Ghost really doesn't – because it uses Node. Switching hosting provider (often to a more expensive one) is more trouble and sacrifice than most people like to go through. Because, for those who are really just interested in writing, the blogging software isn't very important at all. It is where you write your texts and you publish them. Being anal about blogging software is, after all, an occupation for the tech geeks who like to obsess about details. You know those who often have 7 posts on their blog in total. Like the author of this blog post... And me.

robodale 13y ago
This post was relevant to me, because I was just opening a new account on my hosting provider today, and installing WordPress of course for just the reasons laid out. I don't care about anything, other than getting my article on my site so my customers can see it....and they don't care about anything other than the fact my article needs to be there.
debacle 13y ago
> it it runs on just about every shared hosting in the world. Even more to your point, most hosts either provide WordPress installations out of the box or provide some sort of 1 click install via cPanel. For a non-technical user, that's great ease of use.

facepalm 13y ago

I don't like using wordpress because of PHP and security issues. It never occurred to me that I should stop using it because it is too complicated to use. I've tried to find alternatives but I've failed. Now I am looking into hosting my blogs somewhere where hacking won't hurt my other data. The effort to maintain some other solution is too high for me.

Doctor_Fegg 13y ago

"spectacular hubris that's somewhere between laughable and profoundly obnoxious" Confucius say, man who writes sneery headline about "that's adorable" not best placed to criticise others for being obnoxious.

500and4 13y ago
As the author of the article I was a bit wary of the title. And in retrospect not only are you exactly right but it doesn't really reflect the tone of the article or how I actually feel. A bad choice on my part that's made me look a bit of an arse. I shall be more careful in future!

CalRobert 13y ago

I actually have a hard time imagining why I'd use Wordpress anymore. If I want a blog, I'll probably use Ghost. If I want a CMS, I find django-CMS to be pretty awesome (I'm biased because I had to learn Django for a job, though). Wordpress seems like a PITA to work with, though to its credit it has an enormous ecosystem around it.

CalRobert 13y ago
Sheesh if you're going to downvote me you could at least say why.
- josefresco 13y ago
  I didn't down-vote you but I would venture that it's this comment "Wordpress seems like a PITA to work with" Sounds like you don't have any actual experience with WordPress which means it's probably not fair for you to say it's a "pain in the ass" when you're favoring the platform you use simply because it's the one familiar to you. Also it doesn't seem as though you have exp with Ghost either. HNers are a harsh audience.
  - CalRobert 13y ago
    OK, Wordpress seems _to me_ like a PITA to work with. I spent some time working on Wordpress a couple of years ago when I was doing work for a company that purchased a Wordpress-driven site. For other people it may well be a wonderful tool.

aaronbasssett 13y ago

"wordpress is an unauthenticated remote shell that, as a useful side feature, also contains a blog" - http://www.bash.org/?949214= http://www.bash.org/?949214=

nhangen 13y ago

I use WordPress because it has a set of hooks/filters/APIs that make it incredibly easy to build themes and plugins. However, I'm annoyed by the 'money is evil' socialist sentiment that pervades much of the community, and as cool as Matt might be, he's quick to demonize people/companies that differ from him philosophically. Because of that, I would be happy to start building for Ghost too. I'm just waiting for a more robust API, or at least a bit more info on how to develop for it.

sushijain 13y ago

"Wordpress is now a maddeningly complicated CMS and not a blogging platform." Wha? Complicated? Said no one ever.

sushijain 13y ago

"Wordpress is now a maddeningly complicated CMS and not a blogging platform." Wha? Complicated? Said no one ever.

serf 13y ago

Oh, you still use [very popular tech that I no longer use, and is now somehow inferior because of new alternatives I have since found] ? That's adorable.

pknight 13y ago

It just blows my mind that some folks are condescending toward running WP over running a light weight solution with a vastly inferior range of functionality. If you want to publish a series of texts with only a minimum of requirements, sure there a dozens of solutions that could do the job. Publishing snippets of text is easy, no big deal. Serious bloggers might like to have a commenting system, a taxonomy system, a widgets system, an rss feed, a user account system, a way to serve their content in more than one way. You know, typical blog stuff. Ghost is not an alternative to WP, nor are any of the other barebones solutions. Doesn't mean they are not awesome in their own right. It's just the comparison with WP has to stop, because it's like comparing an analogue typewriter to a word processor. Both can comfortably print words, but that's where the comparison ends. You can fetishize simple solutions without having to hate on solutions that aren't even remotely similar in design. And there's also this weird logic behind how people should pick their blogging engine. People don't choose WordPress because they aspire to use only what is written in the most fashionable language or coded by the most popular of programming methodologies, or because of some evolved affection for minimal solutions. They pick it because it has a great community and because it is open source, it's easy to use, it's totally free, you have countless people that can help you, it does a lot of stuff and because you can easily extend it in a countless ways.

josefresco 13y ago

How about "Oh you think you can build a blogging platform that competes with WordPress? How adorable." I find it funny that WordPress was criticized for being a crappy CMS and when it became a decent CMS people criticized it for being a bloated blogging platform. I also find it humorous that seemingly every 20-something rockstar-ninja-startup founder/developer thinks they can write a "better blogging platform" yet I don't see any traction in the real world.

joshvm 13y ago

For some inexplicable reason, the actual download link is hidden on the page: https://ghost.org/download/ https://ghost.org/download/ or their GitHub: https://github.com/tryghost/ghost/ https://github.com/tryghost/ghost/ Looks pretty! As an aside, about Wordpress, there are a couple of important points: 1) The famous install - it's extremely simple, anyone can do it if they have MySQL set up. Even easier if your hoster has CPanel. Ghost requires either hosting on their systems or your own server running Node. The latter is not an option for many customers, the majority of bloggers are _not_ web savvy. 2) Plugins, themes and knowledgebase, pretty damn good. However, like any app store there's a lot of rubbish and it's often hard to tell which plugin you really want. Not to mention you can make Wordpress do virtually anything you want with the right theme. 3) Security. Wordpress is a mire for this. I don't have a well known blog, but I still got hammered by script kiddies trying to upload malicious files, attempting to access restricted directories, etc. Ultimately this is the problem, Wordpress is a fantastic platform, but it requires constant maintenance to make sure that nothing is insecure. This is not a problem if you're a full time blogger, or you're running a profitable website that needs that kind of flexibility. However, for someone who doesn't blog that often and doesn't want this overhead, Wordpress is just too much. I now use a static generator (Octopress) because I can't be bothered with updating all the time, knowing that if I forget, my site is likely to get hacked. It was fairly easy to add support for mathtex too. This plus a hand coded static site for other content is all I need. I don't need any databases, everything is nice and low bandwidth and it's trivial to manage everything with git. Thank god for rake watch!

baudehlo 13y ago
Before CPanel supported wordpress the installation was just as complex for WP as it is now for Ghost. You had to know how to install PHP and Apache and MySQL. All that changes over time as things get more popular.

homersapien 13y ago

Ghost: the super simple minimal blogging platform that requires considerable server experience to setup. Plus you get to write everything in Markdown! What's not to love?

secstate 13y ago

Oh, you're still dumping your own content on someone else's server and hoping they stay in business long enough for your URLs to benefit from the longtail? That's adorable. Wordpress and Ghost are not in the same league. If I'm going to go the trouble of npm installing all the Ghost dependencies, I'm going to use Jeykll or Octopress to statically build my pages of text with snippets. Then I reap the benefits of static pages and easily portable hosting (just dump the static files somewhere, anywhere and folks can read them).

josteink 13y ago

Am I the only one find the landing page for Ghost[1] hilarious? It shows in big fonts, and I quote "Free. Open". And it's written over a background featuring an iPad. An Ipad goddamnit! To market free & open they employ least free and open device on the planet, created by a company with a regular habbit of abusing software-patents, with co-ownerships in several patent-troll corporations to top it off. It may be a decent product, I don't know. But c'mon! If you're going to try to sell me free and open, how about not endorsing patent-trolls while doing so? [1] https://ghost.org/features/ https://ghost.org/features/

pron 13y ago

OK, so after seeing this blog post I took a few minutes, installed Ghost, and tried it. Looks very nice, but obviously directed towards absolute beginners. It's like a pretty Blogger. I've recently started using Jekyll as a blogging platform. It is not exactly for complete noobs, but doesn't require much expertise either; it has a nice and shallow learning curve. Hosting is either free (on GitHub) or very cheap (on S3), the site is extremely fast, and it's got plugins that pack a lot of power. And if you want an online editing UI, there's prose.io that directly integrates with GitHub, and is very pretty, too. So I'm very happy with Jekyll, but for a first time blogger that wants a nice theme I could recommend ghost.

vezzy-fnord 13y ago

The smug hipster arrogance displayed here is simply pathetic. This is an overly prideful magpie gone wrong.

vkb 13y ago

I have been blogging for 6+ years, using Wordpress exclusively. When I started,I was able to get installed, up-to-speed, and adding new themes, tweaking CSS/HTML, and even PHP pretty quickly. Like many, I got tired of constant upgrades, theme management, bloat, etc. Mostly, I was tired that new Wordpress themes were being developed mainly for marketers. I'm a writer. I care about my content being seen on its own merit, not whether the theme has SEO capabilities and carousels. So, I decided to donate to Ghost and give it a try when it came out. Competition is always good. I wasn't technical when I got started with Wordpress, but I am now. I never had issues installing Wordpress. Installing Ghost a couple months back, however, I just gave up. Let me outline the process from a writer's perspective: 1. Ooo. Ghost looks so pretty and so clean for my content. I'd love to have this and get rid of the fifteen different menus there are on Wordpress. 2. goes to installation instructions from Ghost team [1]. "Running Ghost locally on your computer is straight forward, but requires that you install Node.js first." What's Node.js, and why do I, as an end-user, care? Ok. It's some Javascript thing I've been hearing about. That's cool, I guess. It doesn't really matter to me, as long as it looks cool and is easy to write with. So how do I actually install this thing? 3. "I want to install Ghost on:" Mac | Windows | Linux. Huh? I thought this went on my web server somewhere? Like Wordpress does? 4. Ah, ok, here we go: "If you've already decided to deploy Ghost to your server or hosting account, that's great news! The following documentation will walk you through various options for deploying Ghost, from manual setups, to one-click installers." 5. "Manual Setup" Ok, here we go. "You're going to need a hosting package that already has, or will allow you to install Node.js. This means something like a cloud (Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, Rackspace Cloud), VPS (Webfaction, Dreamhost) or other package that has SSH (terminal) access & will allow you to install Node.js" What? What is all this stuff? How do I know whether my webhost will allow me to install Node.js? Do I need to switch to DigitalOcean? 6. I know enough command line to be dangerous, but not sure about all of this stuff. Make Ghost run forever? Why do I have to worry about it stopping running? Is it that different from Wordpress? 7. The init script? Is that finally what I have to do to...oh well, forget it. I've already been Googling stuff for 20 minutes to make sure I understand. This is just too much to take in. I just want to write stuff! Maybe I'll try it again when they have a new release out. Back to Wordpress. Ghost has the potential to be good, but it is just way, way too complicated for the average writer to stop using Wordpress, for now. Or, it's not complicated, and the set-up instructions are written for developers who want to sometimes write, instead of content-creators who might want to experiment with something new. That should change in time. Technologies always trickle down. But for now, yes, I still use Wordpress for my blog, and it might be adorable, but for me, I'm loyal to things that get out of my way and let me do my thing, and Wordpress just does. [1] http://docs.ghost.org/installation/ http://docs.ghost.org/installation/

aleem 13y ago

I like Ghost, I have been watching it closely and rooting for it. However, it just had a bunch of nasty issues that made it frustrating to put up with. I last checked a month or so back and these are the ones I remember off-hand: - Undo/redo is badly broken. If you add an image via ![] there was no undoing beyond that point. Undo was broken in a few other ways too. - Browser spellcheck didn't work. This was a big one for me and for anyone who writes a lot. - The preview doesn't correctly sync with the markdown editor if you add a bunch of images. This got very frustrating because the auto-sync sometimes rendered the preview-pane useless. I can't fathom there isn't a manual override until this gets fixed. It forces the writers to contend with a bug (that still exists) each time they edit a post with images. If you build your blogging platform on top of Markdown you should be ready to work within it's bounds (you can't align images) or let the community write MD extensions (leading to fragmentation and something that will eventually not be MD). Or the third alternative is to have a new flavour (ala GFM) that's maintained by the Ghost team itself with very minor modifications. In light of that, I would really propose the following amendments: - Markdown doesn't align images. That's a severe limitation. - Markdown still sucks at linked images. Try telling a novice to write: [![]()]() At least I think that's what it is. This is an issue with markdown but I think Ghost should take a few liberties as a favour to the rest of us. - For image alignments, I would propose the following: ![ center aligned ](link) ![left aligned ](link) ![ right aligned](link) ![ right aligned squeezed](link) ![ right aligned squeezed more](link) ... - And for linked images and images/links in general I would propose: ![](image-link) ![caption](image-link)(href-link) ![caption](image-link)[alt](href-link) !(image-link)(href-link) !(image-link)

Daviey 13y ago

I'm wondering what they were thinking calling it Ghost. Massively difficult to Google, where Wordpress wins hands down!

syntaxfree 13y ago

Is inline LateX available in a free Ghost host akin to Wordpress.com?

wonderzombie 13y ago

It looks great, but I don't have nor do I want to pay extra for a VPS just so I can install Node, of all things. Contrariwise my host supports installing Wordpress with a single click. The End. This post is just more tech hipsterism. I say this as someone who does indulge in PHP bashing from time to time, and who would like to switch from Wordpress.