Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.
blog.zonino.co.uk
blog.zonino.co.uk
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.
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.
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.
It depresses me how much trouble I had empathizing with this.
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.
Confucius say, man who writes sneery headline about "that's adorable" not best placed to criticise others for being obnoxious.
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.
- 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:
[![]()]()
- For image alignments, I would propose the following:
...
(href-link)
[alt](href-link)
!(image-link)(href-link)
!(image-link)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?
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There we have it. It's you that they were trying to address when they wrote "Ghost is a platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing"[1]. But, I think they are badly failing because they chose to go with Node for a project that was supposed to attract the masses and being about "the future of the freedom of speech" (yes, they actually said that).
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.)
We had 4 security releases in 2013: 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.
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.