by Milan Vydareny

New Beginnings

G'day, everybody. This blog post is the first "original" blog post I have attempted using the Ghost platform. I have blogged in prior years over at Google, but life got in the way of continuing that activity for several years. I was also not terribly fond of the Blogger interface, that I found somewhat clumsy to use and didn't support Markdown, my preferred writing tool.

So I asked my trusty assistant (ChatGPT) for some suggestions and it came up with Ghost as an alternative. I visited the Ghost website, and did some preliminary tests, liked what I found, so here I am.

There was something of a learning curve to be traversed when I started working with Ghost. But given the current state of IT these days, my judgement is that the few stumbling blocks I did encounter (and quickly resolved) give Ghost a four or five star review from me. It does most if not all of the things I would like to do at the present time, plus it offers a few things I'm not interested in pursuing right now.

What I Like About Ghost

• Markdown: What a joy! Ninety percent or more of what a writer cranks out can be handled swiftly and accurately by Markdown. When you're writing you don't need to be distracted by the annoying quirks of Word or any other "word processor"; what you need is to have your thoughts placed rapidly and accurately on the screen, while you're "in the flow." Ghost support of Markdown is probably my most appreciated feature.
• Email Handling: Getting the word out to subscribers has always been a hassle. The current way of handling that without email is via a "feed" and I certainly have a number of feeds that I follow. But the average user doesn't even know what a feed is, let alone how to configure one. Just signing up for an email (that with Ghost includes an exact copy of the original posting) is a huge plus and convenience not only for the blogger, but for the reader.
• Easy Setup: It doesn't take a lot to get things to start working. A few clicks and you're on your way.

Some Frustrations

• Constraints: Along with easy setup come constraints. That's why setup is easy. Customizing your Ghost installation can be a frustrating experience if you're not familiar with the product.
• Documentation: Documentation is somewhat poor, especially the searching capabilities. Simple searches for highly targeted words often fail to yield many meaningful results. It's time for AI to invade the world of help and software documentation.
• Limited Functionality: This is a nit, but when you work with a trial edition of anything it typically has some key functions limited or disabled. This makes some things difficult to work with. Presumably those problems disappear when you pay for the full-blown version.
• Platform: Ghost runs under NodeJS but you are warned it is specifically targeted to a Linux machine. I have gotten the self-hosted version to work on my Windows server, but should that become impossible in the future, I could be in technical trouble.
• Single Tenant Design: By design, Ghost is a single tenant system. This means if you have multiple publications to host, each publication must have its own instance of Ghost running. This obviously will require more resources than if the design were multi-tenant.

Overall Reaction

My overall reaction to Ghost is pretty positive at this point.My needs are modest, currently, and I'm not planning on running a lot of publications of of a single server. The platform issue might be solvable if I were to upgrade server hardware to a system supporing virtualization, which would enable me to run a Linux instance to more closely conform to the Ghost paradigm recommending Linux.

So for the time being, here is where I'll stay, although I may seriously look into self-hosting when I become more familiar with Ghost and its various features and idosyncracies.