I had some fun checking out the brand new Ghost blogging platform. Its claims to fame are:
- It’s a blogging platform that is easy to install and setup
- It can be customized to look the way you want
- It uses Markdown for text formatting, with a very sexy real-time Markdown->HTML converter built in. You type Markdown text in the left pane, and the right pane shows a live preview of the posting.
- It’s free/open source, so you can try it too.
Installation was pretty straightforward. Two comments:
- I was confused when I made my first post: after finish entering the text, there’s a “Save Draft” button that has a popup menu that allows you to “Publish Now”. Cool! But it doesn’t actually publish until you click the button a second time.
- I also had a problem with running it on my test server. It has dramatically limited RAM (128 MBytes) and it’s also running WordPress, Apache, and a bunch of other stuff. Ghost gave an “weird error 137” message in the console, but I’m fairly convinced that’s just because it’s running out of memory. I wrote it up in the ghost forums so others can learn from my research. (https://en.ghost.org/forum/installation/1129-npm-err-weird-error-137)
Ghost seems to be a solid initial release, with a dedicated team that’ll drive it forward.