Log something crazy, but intresting.

What is Ghost Blogging Platform?

Date: Dec 21, 2022

Here is another great blogging platform which also happens to be open-source. I just love open-source applications there is so much that I can do with them. This concept for this platform was in November 2014 but the first stable release was in January 2022. Now that's relatively a very new platform when compared to its peers.

John O'Nolan is the CEO and founder of this project, he also was the deputy lead for User Interface at WordPress. The project was kicked off at Kickstarter where the platform was able to raise way more funds than its goal. Now that's just great, we at least know that people need this kind of project.

I tried this platform because I was getting a lot of good feedback about it. Also when you see top blogging sites doing comparative posts you should know there is something cooking. A good place to view and get an experience from a viewer's perspective is at demo.ghost.io.

To be very honest I also see a lot of WordPress gurus stating that WP is better and a lot of Ghost sites stating GH is better. Of course, I don't trust any of them because I only look at motive, if WP sites are sitting on WordPress and say Ghost is better they should have shifted by now. You don't see that happening, their whole post is clickbait.

This was one of the reasons why I started this site I wanted to stay unbiased when I review a platform. My site is not WordPress or Ghost or Hugo it is based on the most basic language HTML and CSS that is all I use.

Before I go further in writing everything I thought about Ghost. I would like to answer the elephant in the room is Ghost better than WordPress or the other way around? The correct answer is you are comparing apples to oranges. WordPress is a solution for certain sets of problems and Ghost is solving certain other sets.

The only person in the entire world to give you the correct answer is you yourself, if I were in your position and I have to choose one, here is what I would do. I would take two sub-domains one wp.YourDomainName.com and gh.YourDomainName.com and host both WordPress and Ghost. Use it for a month and whichever I feel comfortable with at the end of the month I would host my main domain with that and copy all the content over.

Just by reading a blog post what is better is not the correct way. You need to experience it before you decide. A perfect example of this is the official site for Ghost itself is powered by HUGO. Every platform is solving a certain set of problems and we just need to try that is all we need to do.

What is Ghost?

Ghost is a platform that helps you in creating a business around the content that you create.

To help you understand them better let's take an example where I have a site where I write about wildlife. Now, I want to monetize my content what do I do? Ads, of course, but they are ugly. Ghost has a solution that lets you create subscribers for your content and re-engage them when you create newer articles.

If you just want to write and not monetize you can do that too.

The feeling I got from Ghost is that everything is built around the content and not the site.

Why use Ghost?

Ghost is easy to use, simplistic and minimalistic publishing platform. If you just want to create content and create a business from publishing then this platform is for you. If you are looking to create an e-commerce store or create a site that does financial modelling or runs big data queries it's not for you.

Ghost's publishing interface is clutter-free, with just a white space with a blinking cursor. Waiting for you to write and create as much as you want. Its admin and publishing interface by far is the cleanest I have ever seen in a blogging platform.

If you are overwhelmed with the whole eco-system that is around many blogging platforms and confused with the plugins, themes, seo, digital marketing and emails then Ghost is the platform for you.

With so many features floating around we often forget why we actually started the site and get distracted. Ghost removes every distraction and lets you concentrate on content generation.

How do start with Ghost?

There are two options go for self-hosted or go with the Ghost managed called the Ghost(Pro). When you do a self-host you pay for the domain and hosting. While you go for Pro you pay for the domain and their managed hosting. It's almost the same but everyone has different budgets and you can decide what you want and how you want it to be.

Well, I already had a VPS on standby and have lots of domains so I went for the self-hosting way. I did get stuck at the last stage where the Ghost installer creates a user & database. What worked for me was a pre-created database & user and not letting the Ghost installer do it automatically.

They have a well-documented process on how to install it on a virtual machine. Also, remember on a self-hosted machine you have to manage everything on your own. If you don't know about Sudo commands for system updates, and upgrades and have no knowledge about servers. I would recommend going for Pro.

If it's expensive then Digital Ocean or NameCheap' Ghost machine can be your second-best option. DO has a machine for $5 and NC for $4.99 monthly.

Drawbacks of Ghost

Every platform will have some issue or the other, there are plenty of issues that I saw while using it for publishing.

When I installed Ubuntu, NGINX, MySQL, Node.js and Ghost they eat up my VPS's resources. My 1G memory was always in the 800-1000 range, CPU was most of the time 100% level. Which made my site go offline for a lot of time. The only thing that helped was turning off MySQL's performance_schema=off
Image management is another issue there is no way to look at all the images that are hosted and embedded on the site. I had to login to my server for this detail.
Most of the VPS have their port 25 blocked so, mailing was another issue, you have to integrate mailgun if you want to send emails via Ghost. This adds up to the cost and even to add mail support for the transactional emails you have to dig into your installation and code a bit. There are no plugins but there are integrations that are also via third-party applications Zapier and again its not free, after certain numbers it will be adding to the cost.
No free plan on Pro it's $11 monthly or $9 monthly for an annual plan. This also has limited features like no custom themes, only 500 members and 5MB upload limit. Even if you are not looking for members you end up paying the same amount.

Advantages of Ghost

Firstly I would bring out their community on their forum, they are very helpful. Even if you have a self-hosted installation, you will find this community helping you out.
Clutter and distraction-free writing experience not just for the writer but also for the reader.
Editable social sharing cards built directly into the platform.
Creating content into newsletters.
Most importantly they create a business around your content. Help you in generating earnings from your paid subscribers.

What do I think of Ghost?

Just another publishing platform they currently only have a market share of 0.1% they have a long way to go. If you are just starting out with your first site, I will not recommend this. It has a bit of a learning curve, you should also be aware of a little bit of HTML and CSS.

Platforms usually depend a lot on their eco-system and Ghost is very new and is still building that world.

I really like the idea that you can create a business out of your content but you should be aware of what you want to do. If you just want to write and earn then it is a good platform for you but later if you want to add e-commerce then you will land into trouble.

It's not very user-friendly when it comes to installation if I have to compare it with WordPress. I can run a WordPress installation straight from my cPanel on shared hosting at a dirt-cheap cost. Whereas Ghost (Pro) is not cheap it's a premium platform for publishing your content.

On the site, they also mention builtin native SEO please be aware that they can only control a few of the SEO factors, that are in their control. There are more than 200 factors that a search engine looks at just by being on Ghost will not give your domain authority over others. If your content is not good and compelling then nothing will work for you.

I also read somewhere about Ghost using markdown for their editor. They are nothing like HUGO or Jekyll on the backend, in markdown, I will use ## for an H2 Heading and # for an H1 heading. You don't code in Ghost to create content on the editor you write normally and select the option from a button to do this.

There are a lot of big names and corporations that are using Ghost but then they have the money and resources and also use many other platforms. This should not be the selecting criteria or even an influencer for that matter. I want you to try the platform before making a decision on what works for you.

Ghost has a lot of potential and will they enter into other spheres that will be interesting to watch.