Oh, you still use [very popular tech that I no longer use, and is now somehow inferior because of new alternatives I have since found] ? That's adorable.
Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.
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Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.
#32He's making it sound really easy. The reason many people end up using WP for their self hosted blog is that it runs on just about every shared hosting in the world. Ghost really doesn't – because it uses Node. 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…
This post was relevant to me, because I was just opening a new account on my hosting provider today, and installing WordPress of course for just the reasons laid out. I don't care about anything, other than getting my article on my site so my customers can see it....and they don't care about anything other than the fact my article needs to be there.
Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.
#33It just blows my mind that some folks are condescending toward running WP over running a light weight solution with a vastly inferior range of functionality. If you want to publish a series of texts with only a minimum of requirements, sure there a dozens of solutions that could do the job. Publishing snippets of text is easy, no big deal.
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.
Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.
#34Given that the author goes on to condemn Wordpress as overly feature-heavy and too complicated for most users, I don't feel like 'adorable' is the right word there. At any rate, this platform looks awesome. Markdown editing with live-previewing? Sounds like a dream come true for anyone who just wants to write words and put them on the Internet.
People who want to just write words don't necessarily want to learn/use markdown though.
Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.
#35For a blog? I thought people used Wordpress as a CMS these days.
I think there are still plenty of plain old blogs out there using wordpress. It's a great CMS but lousy at being a lightweight blogging platform.
It's not lousy at being a blogging platform. It's feature heavy but you just ignore the features and blog.
Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.
#36He's making it sound really easy. The reason many people end up using WP for their self hosted blog is that it runs on just about every shared hosting in the world. Ghost really doesn't – because it uses Node. 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…
> it it runs on just about every shared hosting in the world.
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.
Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.
#37How about "Oh you think you can build a blogging platform that competes with WordPress? How adorable."
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.
Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.
#38For some inexplicable reason, the actual download link is hidden on the page: https://ghost.org/download/ or their GitHub: https://github.com/tryghost/ghost/
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!
Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.
#39Ghost: the super simple minimal blogging platform that requires considerable server experience to setup. Plus you get to write everything in Markdown! What's not to love?
Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.
#40I think Ghost is absolutely awesome. It's slick, it has potential, there's a lot of enthusiasm for it. I have been running an instance since the first public release. There is no comparison between it and Wordpress though. 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…
Thanks for such an insightful comment. Out of curiosity, in what way is WordPress optimized for SEO? Is it the URL structure? Isn't the actual content what matters the most?