Ghost: Just a Blogging Platform | Hacker News Reader

Ghost: Just a Blogging Platform

tryghost.org

105 pointsskattyadz44 comments

I apologise for the confusion guys, this site wasn't really intended with you in mind as the target audience. I believe there was another direct link to the Kickstarter campaign which would have been more appropriate for HN. The marketing site is simply a "pretty thing" to attract some interest from consumers / casual users. Not intended as full demonstration or marketed at developers. I'll post myself when there's something you guys will actually be interested in (aka a GitHub link with a public repo in it).

And yes "impatient in Manhatten" - that can be arranged, bro.

The domain 'tryghost' is something of a misnomer: this is a Kickstarter project.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-...

Yeah. The "Ready? Try Ghost" button at the end is just an ad for their kickstarter project.

They should have just stated what it was up front.

Yep not cool

The Kickstarter link's the one they've been sharing, I just saw this and thought it had a good rundown of features

This project doesn't exist. It's just a bait for the kickstarter page. Kind of bummed out, the features looked nice and I wanted to try it out.

Perhaps a mod can change the title to 'Kickstarter: Ghost - Just a Blogging Platform'.

I really, really like this. The decision to use Kickstarter might upset some, but I think it's a pragmatic way of ensuring that talent can focus on it to actually deliver a project to users.

Still, I really hope to see a lot of activity pop-up on GitHub. Community is a bug reason WordPress won over everyone else and while I'm a big fan of opinionated software leadership, I also hope to see more people bring their ideas to the table.

This is a niche for sure, but a niche I happily backed, in part because this looks like something I would really like to use.

The decision to use Node is interesting. Another reason WordPress was so successful is because basically anyone with shared hosting could install it without having to use anything more than an FTP client (and now basically every host has a 1-click install). I'm curious as to the impact this might have on adoption beyond the hosted platform for its targeted user base.

Regardless, I backed and I hope to see this sort of thing succeed, if only because we need more stuff like this in the wild.

(I hope this doesn't sound like I'm being negative, I'm just thinking out loud)

The video specifically mentions being targeted at users, not developers and taking a look at the kickstarter page, this feels less like an open source project and more like a startup that plans to open source it's core software.

There's certainly a focus on selling it as a complete, ready to go package, tightly wrapped and best served with their hosting service, with the people living inside the ecosystem (Users, themers, etc) being the first class citizen here. It almost feels closer to Tumblr (minus social) than Wordpress.

Even the "How does it work?" section seems to be written for someone who will build themes and plugins, specifically mentioning what the MIT licence means for theme developers.

I'm really interested to see how this plays out, and if successful what the community will look like. It feels like a pretty unique setup. Or maybe I'm reading into it too much. : )

I think it's rather sad when a project says they're open source, then says things like :

"You'll need hosting for your blog no matter what, but our service will be the most powerful way of running Ghost - and the easiest to get started with. You'll have the full Ghost software with all bells, whistles, themes, plugins, and some extras that are only available with us (like automatic updates and backups)."

So they won't be open sourcing it then if they're planning on not allowing people to add these features to the main code base?

"Ghost is an Open Source application", tiny github image link in footer and organization has no public repositories.. (https://github.com/tryghost)

No repo's because it's not released yet, it's a kickstarter.

re: tiny github image link, the video does specifically mention it's a project targeted at users, not developers, so I guess having things like that as a footnote make sense. Can't comment on how this strategy will work out, guess we'll see.

Yeah, it took quite long to notice that it was kickstarter ad. Although there is something done if you believe actual kickstarter page.

Also, whole point of first paragraph in the site is to promote that app is open source and what benefits it brings to the users. So using open source for marketing and then kind of hiding actual source.. not nice.

The two features they list as "extra" by going with them are automatic backups and updates, both of which are hosting features, not software features.

I don't think that's what they're saying at all. I think they're saying there are some features that are going to work best on an integrated hosting platform, just by their nature

I would be much more willing to pledge towards this if the current state of their code was available to see / install.

That would require the person doing the kickstarter to commit time to the project. I get the impression from most of these software-development kickstarters that the goal is to get payment in advance of the dev work.

Isn't that what raising VC money is all about? What's wrong with raising money for something you're going to spend several months on?

It goes against the original spirit of kickstarter.

Although it was targeted towards hardware products, I think similar guidelines should be in place for software: http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-not-a-store

"Product simulations are prohibited. Projects cannot simulate events to demonstrate what a product might do in the future. Products can only be shown performing actions that they’re able to perform in their current state of development."

And this makes sense in light of true software development: 10% of the time is spent building the rough prototype and 90% of the time is spent refining. And oftentimes the development money is useful for the tedium like tests and validation,.

I'm looking for something like this, but there is no this here. "Try it" should go to Github, not Kickstarter.

Hasn't Aaron Swartz's http://www.jottit.com solved this problem for years now?

Go ahead - type in some markdown, then edit the page. You'll be presented with a two-pane view. Your markdown is rendered dynamically. When you're done, just choose the access level for the page (public/private) and you're good to go.

The SSL certificate on that website is broken. It's unusable in Chrome.

I like the idea of an easy-to-use blogging platform, but I'm not completely sold on the use of markdown.

I'd rather see another syntax language that allowed me a few more controls, like the ability to add classes to elements in case I wanted to switch up styles a bit (maybe I don't want all blockquotes to look the same, or all lists, etc).

I agree. While I think markdown is really neat, but I hate having to mess with paragraph tags when using css classes.

Call me when it's ready...

Yes, sir.

Roger that.

It looks good and the execution seems to be well done. What I would really like to see a blogging platform that has a different take on article creation than textarea + publishing.

Blog publishing is also about research, collecting the content and iterating on the article's content until one feels satisfied with the result.

The UI seems to have taken a page from http://mouapp.com/

Do you think that it does a roundtrip to the server to get the preview or is it all done in JS?

I would hope it's done in JavaScript. And, based on the image uploading stuff, (you type something like `!image` and the preview adds in a drag-n-drop spot for an image), it looks like it.

The Ghost design looks very polished. A shame to see the good efforts buried under marketing missteps.

The side-by-side authoring and editing is something I think a lot of folks are doing now in their personal blogs. For mine, I just used plain HTML rather than Markdown [1]. I wanted total control of the resulting markup. Beware, most people hate the background. Just fair warning.

The hard part for me was doing some trickery to scroll to and highlight the current paragraph in the live preview panel. I ended up inserting a "cursor" span that I locate in the preview panel and then scroll to that, find its containing block container, and add a class to that container [2].

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/simplest-of-webapps

[2] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/images/tiamat-authoring-2012-10.pn...

If you're going to be a non-profit, wouldn't it be better to establish the non-profit and then do a fundraising drive? Assuming it's a tax-deductible non-profit, you have an additional benefit to the donation.

Best of luck with the project!

Their own Blog has no RSS-Feed. I'm not convinced. Looks good, though.

I hope http://blog.tryghost.org/ isn't intended as a demo. It's only a single article, no permalinks, no archives, no RSS/Atom feed.

But it certainly loads quickly.

Button at bottom opens a modal that I can't scroll on an iPhone 5.

The simplicity and markdown support reminds me a lot of http://throwww.com/ which is very impressive.

There's a broken link on the question mark above the CodeMirror widget. It should link to the Markdown website but it links to a 404.

Looks like Medium.

Would it be possible to see the rest of that chest tattoo? I'm dying to know.

- impatient in Manhattan

If they have latex support, I'd use it. Until then it's Wordpress for me.

There is no code or sample site. Looks like a scam to me.

Try trilldy.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com