When I first got into WordPress, it was a blogging platform. People owned blogs, people blogged, people read, people interacted and the whole system worked beautifully. But then, somewhere down the line, the power behind WordPress freed it from its shackles as a blogging platform and made it an extremely simple way to use as a CMS, no matter how vast the content.

It was a change to live with, whether we liked it or not. And WordPress’ route map deviated from powering blogs to powering websites of all kinds. For a moment, it felt awkward to think I had a blog hosted on a service no longer entirely dedicated to it, but it was short lived.

In spite of all this, I always yearned for a blogging platform that would manage itself and let me write freely. We still do not have such a product, but several come very close. The one with its roots closest to WordPress is Mr John O’Nolan’s Ghost.

The premise

Ghost is built on node.js, currently a complicated mush to set up which shared hosting services do not even allow. I have never set up a platform (well, anything, really) built on node.js before, so I figured I represented a larger section of Ghost’s expected user base.

Mr O’Nolan’s argument is that WordPress started off as a PHP-based service, based on Michale Valdrighi’s b2 (also a PHP-based service) around a time when PHP was as unsupported as node.js is now. But that, he says, does not mean node.js will not become mainstream in the future, given that it is better than PHP and its contemporaries already.

“Technology advances.” He says, rightly.

The installation

My biggest qualm is Ghost’s premature public release. The product is not yet ready. (And I’m saying this from a layman’s perspective, wanting to have nothing to do whatsoever with coding at the moment.) Why was Ghost pushed out as a public release when the simplest way to set up a Ghost blog, on my Ubuntu machine, for instance, is to run each of these commands:

wget http://nodejs.org/dist/node-latest.tar.gz
tar -xzf node-latest.tar.gz
cd /opt/node
./configure
make
sudo make install
sudo mkdir -p /var/www
cd /var/www/
sudo wget http://ghost.org/zip/ghost-0.3.3.zip
sudo unzip -d ghost ghost-0.3.3.zip
cd ghost/
sudo npm install --production
host: 'ip here',
port: '2368'

and then start production with this:

sudo npm start --production

Ghost is not competing with WordPress, as far as I can tell, because that would not make sense. However, even while Mr O’Nolan did not fork Ghost from the WordPress Open Source project as some have been claiming, few can repudiate that it was built to deliver an attack on WordPress’ blogging premise.

Take a look at the outline of the original Ghost idea, for example. The entire article, beautifully formatted, speaks solely of how Ghost will right everything WordPress got wrong. So it has, indeed, always come down to WordPress. And this means Ghost, to lure users, will have to combat WordPress on a few other things, the biggest and most important of the lot being the famous five-minute installation that WordPress boasts.

In the crowd

Another issue Ghost will have to deal with is that blogging platforms have come such a long way since the 1990s that they are now a dime a dozen, and free services are pretty great as well. Ghost’s confirmed pricing is like so:

And with noncompetitive pricing, Ghost will not hold as much appeal as Roon or Pen, or the pretty weird but interesting concept beind Throwww, or, my current favourite of the lot, Medium, from the people who started the original Blogger.

They all have different ideas and appeals, and Ghost’s biggest card, as far as I know, is expansion: you can build a massive news blog, the next Mashable, if you like, to paraphrase O’Nolan (if my memory serves me right, because I don’t seem to be able to locate the source where I read this).

Is it ready for the public yet?

My answer, in short, is a resounding no. The system Ghost runs on is unsupported by the shared hosting servers used by far too many people (read far too many potential Ghost users) and many have said this already. But even with node.js running, Ghost has failed to market its ease of use as much as it has marketed its focus and scope.

I am quite happy that Ghost is bringing the focus back on blogging, but this is a poor foundation to build an entire product on because many others are doing just that. What more can Ghost offer? It’s website does not make that as clear as I’d like.

I like the markdown v formatted dual display post editor on Ghost, but is that enough to make me want to use Ghost? I doubt it. WordPress’ distraction free writing coupled by a preview on a second browser tab will serve my needs just fine albeit involve two mouse clicks more. I have no problem with two mouse clicks; in fact they let me breathe and think between writing paragraph upon paragraph continuously.

Free. Open. Could be simpler.

Ghost also speaks little about SEO. The term SEO, although largely alient in concept to half of all bloggers, is still a term they have heard somewhere and have increasingly come to be conscious of. Ghost’s ousting of the concept of a sidebar in design in exchange for a single-column layout may not fit well with everybody’s ideology, and definitely not from a presentation standpoint because, while they all want their content read, they also want other titbits of information displayed, from badges to follow buttons to more important things like popular, related and top posts/comments which help increase user engagement.

Further, returning to Ghost’s claim that it can be used to build a single, personal blog or a large scale one, it’s hard to think of a reason why large scale ones will not just prefer WordPress. Because PHP is old? Highly unlikely; it’s the tech syndrome where a product seems old very fast, whereas to the general public things move at a more stable rate. For instance, Android 4.0 is not as ancient to the average smartphone user as we think.

By far the smallest problem I see with Ghost is markdown. I write my articles straight in HTML, including this one, and I have no problem switching to Markdown, but the average user, many of whom have freshly pressed WordPress blogs with remarkable content today (so their ability is not being questioned), could not care less about markdown. Once again, a couple of mouse clicks and a drop-down to set h1 is not too much trouble. Or consider WordPress’ ctrl+1 to ctrl+6 shortcuts that make the job just as mouse-free.

But is Ghost any good at all?

This time round, my answer is a resounding yes. Ghost is promising if not as revolutionary as its creators would like to believe. But, more importantly, Ghost has potential. It is under the hands of some of the finest developers around, already has a beautiful and established visual style — something very important for any product targeted at the non-developer.

I have previously (even if very briefly) spoken of my enthusiasm for Ghost and my intention of holding back my upcoming essays weblog to launch it on Ghost, so any questions as to my bias should be put down with that.

If Ghost creates an installation package that just works and offers a free subdomain.ghost.org usage plan to go with it, it would instantly become a no-brainer for any blogger. It would give back the almost holistic and exclusive atmosphere WordPress bloggers commanded back when Mr Matt Mullenweg’s service was among the most powerful options and definitely the easiest one to get started with.

The Ghost dashboard is more beautiful than WordPress’

I love minimalism. (Is it not rather overly obvious around here?) So I love Ghost’s look and Ghost blog designs. But how many really share this feeling about minimalism?

I also like how Ghost design structures are closely related to those of WordPress. That was arguably the smartest pitch made and one that helped rope Woo in as Ghost’s design partner.

As Mr O’Nolan himself says, Ghost has an unfair advantage since it stands on the shoulders of giants. But in that case, the smart thing to do is make it easy for users to climb from the giant’s shoulders onto yours: Ghost needs to be different in approach, beliefs and looks, among other things, but without requiring users to scale yet another learning curve to use its product.

However, Ghost is less than a year old (if counted from its Kickstarter campaign anyway), so it has a long way to go. And at this rate of progress, I’m sure O’Nolan and his team can make this article null and void in no time.

Lastly, I appreciate certain parts of Ghost’s spirits a lot. In my opinion, the best thing Mr O’Nolan has said about his brainchild so far is pretty straightforward: “Do we want to make millions and sell to Facebook, or do we want to make something that’s genuinely good and serves its users, not its investors and shareholders?”

That is the way to go.

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