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Comment by colemorrison | Hacker News Reader

I will be honest. I use ghost as my blogging platform for about a year, and in comparison to wordpress... it just doesn't hold up. Everything from stuff as big as upgrading, mid range as plugins, and even simple things like spell check were overlooked (at least in the version I have). It kind of reminds me of the Pepsi Vs. Coke test. Went to it for that initial appeal of simplicity.. and now am very dissatisfied due to how much its lacking.

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> Went to it for that initial appeal of simplicity.. and now am very dissatisfied due to how much its lacking.

I am reminded of (but unable to find...) the Joel on Software essay that noted that it's always trivial to write simple, unbloated software, until people realise that they all have a different, lightly overlapping 10% of features that they need.

It was called 'Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth' - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html

People only use 20% of the features of an app. The problem is that everyone uses a different 20%.

Sounds good but it's not true.

Most people use the same basic features -- let's say they use 18% of same stuff, and 2% of more unique to them features.

The rise of "lightweight" apps that tons of people use has proven that taking out the bloat is possible for most people (e.g. casual users can work with Pixelmator or Acorn just fine, don't need Photoshop).

Totally depends on the particular software and the market it serves. Mass market stuff I think lends well to simplified designs.

Vertical market software tends to have very specific requirements which are unfortunately not agreed upon by all of the big players in the industry. So you can simplify it, but if your software doesn't support X, Y and Z then you can't sign Corporation Foo. And you start getting feature requests (er, orders some might say) from your bigger clients who are paying for thousands of subscriptions/licenses. But Corporation Bar doesn't like that - so it has to go in as an option/preference. Repeat this process for about 5 years and you have what appears to be a bloated piece of software.

OTOH, sometimes you might be building something that gets beginners into something, before they need those extra features. E.g., I don't yet blog, and if I were to, starting out with Ghost or similar would be very appealing. Only later would I understand what I need/want enough to roll my own.

And the problem with those features is that the graph isn’t linear but exponential. The last 10, 1% of features are always 90, 99% of the work, and the thing that dissuades people like me from using something else without those features.

Proper Markdown and footnote support is usually one of those things.

www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html

Can't imagine how he didn't find it with such a useful URL /s

How many URLs do you have memorized?

Keywords in URLs are useful for automated searching (eg "@ keyword" in Firefox's 'awesomebar'). Human readable URLs seem like pretty good things for usability to me, perhaps he has them but has these terse ones for archival purposes?

Nonetheless it's an interesting question - hundreds??

This reminds me of 10X rule [1] - "A technology needs to be 10x better than a previous one for widespread adoption". Although, the initial appeal of Ghost as a cleaner, sleeker blogging platform seems attractive, if that's the only thing you want to sell, then I am not sure how successful you can be.

Is there a reason, why someone can't use a similar theme and markdown plugin with wordpress to achieve the same?

[1]: http://www.minidisc.org/econ113-paper.htm

well for devs, a lot of us don't want stuck in php. though I don't want to be stuck in node either :(

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