Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable. • Hacker News Board

Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.

#41

Post by secstate » Mon, Feb 10, 2014, 2:32 PM UTC

Oh, you're still dumping your own content on someone else's server and hoping they stay in business long enough for your URLs to benefit from the longtail? That's adorable.

Wordpress and Ghost are not in the same league. If I'm going to go the trouble of npm installing all the Ghost dependencies, I'm going to use Jeykll or Octopress to statically build my pages of text with snippets. Then I reap the benefits of static pages and easily portable hosting (just dump the static files somewhere, anywhere and folks can read them).

Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.

#42

Post by josteink » Mon, Feb 10, 2014, 2:34 PM UTC

Am I the only one find the landing page for Ghost[1] hilarious?

It shows in big fonts, and I quote "Free. Open". And it's written over a background featuring an iPad. An Ipad goddamnit!

To market free & open they employ least free and open device on the planet, created by a company with a regular habbit of abusing software-patents, with co-ownerships in several patent-troll corporations to top it off.

It may be a decent product, I don't know. But c'mon! If you're going to try to sell me free and open, how about not endorsing patent-trolls while doing so?

[1] https://ghost.org/features/

Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.

#43

Post by pron » Mon, Feb 10, 2014, 2:40 PM UTC

OK, so after seeing this blog post I took a few minutes, installed Ghost, and tried it.

Looks very nice, but obviously directed towards absolute beginners. It's like a pretty Blogger.

I've recently started using Jekyll as a blogging platform. It is not exactly for complete noobs, but doesn't require much expertise either; it has a nice and shallow learning curve.

Hosting is either free (on GitHub) or very cheap (on S3), the site is extremely fast, and it's got plugins that pack a lot of power. And if you want an online editing UI, there's prose.io that directly integrates with GitHub, and is very pretty, too.

So I'm very happy with Jekyll, but for a first time blogger that wants a nice theme I could recommend ghost.

Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.

#44

Post by vezzy-fnord » Mon, Feb 10, 2014, 2:40 PM UTC

The smug hipster arrogance displayed here is simply pathetic. This is an overly prideful magpie gone wrong.

Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.

#45

Post by vkb » Mon, Feb 10, 2014, 2:42 PM UTC

I have been blogging for 6+ years, using Wordpress exclusively. When I started,I was able to get installed, up-to-speed, and adding new themes, tweaking CSS/HTML, and even PHP pretty quickly.

Like many, I got tired of constant upgrades, theme management, bloat, etc. Mostly, I was tired that new Wordpress themes were being developed mainly for marketers.

I'm a writer. I care about my content being seen on its own merit, not whether the theme has SEO capabilities and carousels. So, I decided to donate to Ghost and give it a try when it came out. Competition is always good.

I wasn't technical when I got started with Wordpress, but I am now. I never had issues installing Wordpress. Installing Ghost a couple months back, however, I just gave up. Let me outline the process from a writer's perspective:

1. Ooo. Ghost looks so pretty and so clean for my content. I'd love to have this and get rid of the fifteen different menus there are on Wordpress.

2. goes to installation instructions from Ghost team [1].

"Running Ghost locally on your computer is straight forward, but requires that you install Node.js first." What's Node.js, and why do I, as an end-user, care? Ok. It's some Javascript thing I've been hearing about. That's cool, I guess. It doesn't really matter to me, as long as it looks cool and is easy to write with. So how do I actually install this thing?

3. "I want to install Ghost on:" Mac | Windows | Linux. Huh? I thought this went on my web server somewhere? Like Wordpress does?

4. Ah, ok, here we go: "If you've already decided to deploy Ghost to your server or hosting account, that's great news! The following documentation will walk you through various options for deploying Ghost, from manual setups, to one-click installers."

5. "Manual Setup" Ok, here we go. "You're going to need a hosting package that already has, or will allow you to install Node.js. This means something like a cloud (Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, Rackspace Cloud), VPS (Webfaction, Dreamhost) or other package that has SSH (terminal) access & will allow you to install Node.js" What? What is all this stuff? How do I know whether my webhost will allow me to install Node.js? Do I need to switch to DigitalOcean?

6. I know enough command line to be dangerous, but not sure about all of this stuff. Make Ghost run forever? Why do I have to worry about it stopping running? Is it that different from Wordpress?

7. The init script? Is that finally what I have to do to...oh well, forget it. I've already been Googling stuff for 20 minutes to make sure I understand. This is just too much to take in. I just want to write stuff! Maybe I'll try it again when they have a new release out. Back to Wordpress.

Ghost has the potential to be good, but it is just way, way too complicated for the average writer to stop using Wordpress, for now. Or, it's not complicated, and the set-up instructions are written for developers who want to sometimes write, instead of content-creators who might want to experiment with something new.

That should change in time. Technologies always trickle down.

But for now, yes, I still use Wordpress for my blog, and it might be adorable, but for me, I'm loyal to things that get out of my way and let me do my thing, and Wordpress just does.

[1] http://docs.ghost.org/installation/

Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.

#46

Post by aleem » Mon, Feb 10, 2014, 2:47 PM UTC

I like Ghost, I have been watching it closely and rooting for it. However, it just had a bunch of nasty issues that made it frustrating to put up with. I last checked a month or so back and these are the ones I remember off-hand:

- Undo/redo is badly broken. If you add an image via ![] there was no undoing beyond that point. Undo was broken in a few other ways too.

- Browser spellcheck didn't work. This was a big one for me and for anyone who writes a lot.

- The preview doesn't correctly sync with the markdown editor if you add a bunch of images. This got very frustrating because the auto-sync sometimes rendered the preview-pane useless. I can't fathom there isn't a manual override until this gets fixed. It forces the writers to contend with a bug (that still exists) each time they edit a post with images.

If you build your blogging platform on top of Markdown you should be ready to work within it's bounds (you can't align images) or let the community write MD extensions (leading to fragmentation and something that will eventually not be MD). Or the third alternative is to have a new flavour (ala GFM) that's maintained by the Ghost team itself with very minor modifications. In light of that, I would really propose the following amendments:

- Markdown doesn't align images. That's a severe limitation.

- Markdown still sucks at linked images. Try telling a novice to write:

  [![]()]()

At least I think that's what it is. This is an issue with markdown but I think Ghost should take a few liberties as a favour to the rest of us.

- For image alignments, I would propose the following:

  ![ center aligned ](link)
  ![left aligned ](link)
  ![ right aligned](link)
  ![  right aligned squeezed](link)
  ![   right aligned squeezed more](link)
  ...

- And for linked images and images/links in general I would propose:

    ![](image-link)
    ![caption](image-link)(href-link)
    ![caption](image-link)[alt](href-link)
    !(image-link)(href-link)
    !(image-link)

Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.

#47

Post by unicornporn » Mon, Feb 10, 2014, 2:53 PM UTC

vkb wrote: post #45

I have been blogging for 6+ years, using Wordpress exclusively. When I started,I was able to get installed, up-to-speed, and adding new themes, tweaking CSS/HTML, and even PHP pretty quickly. Like many, I got tired of constant upgrades, theme management, bloat, etc. Mostly, I was tired that new Wordpress themes were being developed mainly for marketers. I'm a writer. I care about my content being seen on its own meri…

> This is just too much to take in. I just want to write stuff!

There we have it. It's you that they were trying to address when they wrote "Ghost is a platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing"[1]. But, I think they are badly failing because they chose to go with Node for a project that was supposed to attract the masses and being about "the future of the freedom of speech" (yes, they actually said that).

[1] https://ghost.org/about/

Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.

#48

Post by tim333 » Mon, Feb 10, 2014, 3:04 PM UTC

ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #40

spindritf wrote: post #13

I 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?

It's got free tools like http://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.

#49

Post by 500and4 » Mon, Feb 10, 2014, 3:34 PM UTC

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #19

"spectacular hubris that's somewhere between laughable and profoundly obnoxious" Confucius say, man who writes sneery headline about "that's adorable" not best placed to criticise others for being obnoxious.

As the author of the article I was a bit wary of the title. And in retrospect not only are you exactly right but it doesn't really reflect the tone of the article or how I actually feel. A bad choice on my part that's made me look a bit of an arse. I shall be more careful in future!

Re: Oh, you still use Wordpress for your blog? That's adorable.

#50

Post by tim333 » Mon, Feb 10, 2014, 3:39 PM UTC

wayanon wrote: post #14

Unless you self-host the minimum cost is $5/mo covering 10,000 views. Cheap but not free.

I was thinking that - not even terribly cheap if you are the average blogger just being read by an handful of friends and acquaintances. That shouldn't cost $60/yr. The equivalent at Wordpress costs $0.