151–160 of 182 posts
Thanks for the post, its great to hear that Ghost is doing well - I love using it. > [Github] has become too transactional - more support tool than collaboration I strongly agree with this. I wish Github "Issues" were relabeled "Comments" and need not be "Open" or "Closed". Issues need action, comments do not. I've been burned many times now by solving someone's issue and then finding out they use my code for their b…
Good morning HN! John from Ghost here - Thanks for all your support over the last 5 years. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that very first blog post hitting the #1 spot of HN and getting so much attention back in 2012. That was the very first time anyone ever heard about Ghost, and everything we've built since then has been thanks to that.
How is the decision to use emberjs as the Admin interface panning out for you?
Upgrades are painless, typically requiring around an hour at most. If there are bigger framework changes we can usually upgrade immediately then clean up deprecations later as necessary but even then the work is normally minimal. When there are more stylistic changes that touch many files it's usually very quick work thanks to the codemods that are released alongside. All of this despite huge and continuous under-the-hood improvements in Ember since we've been using it.
Compared to what I've seen in other frameworks I think we've benefitted a lot in being able to spend pretty much zero time bike shedding which libraries will make up our core framework. We also save a lot of time not needing to upgrade disparate parts of a custom framework built of 3rd party libraries that aren't necessarily in sync with each other. The Ember addon ecosystem has also been stellar, with common solutions rallied around by the community such that they are usually as stable as core and kept up-to-date with the latest idioms without breaking backwards compatibility.
In conclusion Ember has allowed us to focus almost entirely on product rather than framework. It stays out of the way and provides very clear happy paths for typical workflows whilst allowing us to break out of those where needed without sacrificing any tooling or upgradability.
As for the downsides I think the biggest has been the limited pool of contributors. A lot of react bandwagon jumping has happened since we started with Ember and it's interesting when talking to other developers outside of the Ember ecosystem because there's a lot of historical and outdated views about what Ember is and isn't. The Ember core team and community is working hard to improve Ember's marketing message to counter that but it's tough to break through when the framework's core selling point is consistency through hype cycles.
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The focus and priorities assigned to whoever does the work will be set by their manager. It's fairly easy to see that a Marketing manager will view the desired end result quite differently than an Engineering manager would. With a corresponding difference in the focus and priorities then set accordingly.
The whole company is nine people. I don't think managerial siloing is likely to have kicked in yet.
I was a backer in the kickstarter campaign, but various "issues" eventually led me to look elsewhere.
Ghost is (was?) rather good, but the thing that ultimately sold me on it back on kickstarter was the much hyped dashboard, which never made it.
Before Docker it was a pain to manage dependencies and keep everything up to date, but with the official Docker image, things got better - until a flurry of almost daily releases to the 1.x branch made it a chore again.
The final nail in the coffin was dropping PostgreSQL support. While it wouldn't be much of an issue if starting on a clean host, with a clean slate, i run all of my other stuff in PostgreSQL, and i much prefer to only administer/backup one DMBS.
I'm currently on Hugo, and i really miss the online editing/publishing from Ghost.
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Congratulations on the 5th anniversary! A question: Do you think your choice of technology stack (JavaScript, node.js) played a part in your success? I've read many times from product creators that developers wildly overestimate the importance of choosing a language or technology stack when in fact it has little bearing on whether a product will succeed. Do you have any thoughts on this topic?
I do! It's nuanced, and every language decision has benefits and drawbacks. Making a bet on JavaScript/Node.js 5+ years ago was a big risk - a lot of people laughed at us or chastised the decision. A lot of those people are now also rewriting their apps in JavaScript. When it came to selecting Node, the biggest benefit was that it was notable. If we had said "HEY we're making another blogging platform in, wait for it…
And those are exactly the ones I want to hear about.
Like you I find the old, established tech choices to be good. New tech is fun to play with, but when I need to get work done and keep it running (for years) I take old every time.
Please write more on this!
Also, I like the interplay between new/risky tech in one area of your story and established in others. Pushing a manageable number of boundaries.
I took the time to write to the Ghost support email with my thoughts on the switch and my main issues (namely no categories, lack of i18n, editor live-view performance with many images, no search -- this was middle 2016, maybe they have these features now but they didn't then)
They took the trouble of answering my email, I found it rather nice.
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If you’re setup as a non-profit and you reinvest all profit, what do you do if you get to the point that you are making more profit than you can reasonably reinvest? Build up a large cash reserve?
Fantastic question. So the obvious answer is grow the company, right? That's pretty much what Amazon did for 20 years. Eschew profit in favour of reinvesting in building the company as big as possible. Not really our style, we'd rather keep the company small, but there's definitely still room to grow quite a lot from where we are now. Beyond that point, we can spend money on anything which reasonably furthers the mis…
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Yeah, I was really surprised by the Postgres being dropped. I was using it and suddenly it was deprecated and removed... I use Postgres for other things, really don't like having to have a separate MySQL setup just for ghost...
From the article: > Developers regularly show up on Github, rage at us for something like not supporting Postgres - and then we say "ok so are you going to write and maintain Postgres support for Ghost?" and they say "of course not, I don't have time for that!" - and then occasionally they'll go on Twitter and tell all their followers to give us hell. As if organising a mob and shouting louder is the best way to get…
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Homepage says it's FOSS, features page says it's FOSS, the developer page links to a giant Download button. And how is it lying about their comparisons? It is indeed simpler to set up a Ghost site than a Wordpress site, and has more features out-of-the-box that you'd otherwise have to download sketchy plugins for with Wordpress/etc.
> It is indeed simpler to set up a Ghost site than a Wordpress site... I...am not sure about that. WordPress, for all its warts, is exceedingly easy for even non-technical users to get up and running; that was a huge contributing factor to its rise. And a large part of that ease of use came from its choice of PHP and MySQL. I know that in 2018 it's a lot easier to get non-PHP web apps up and running than it was in, s…
> Decentralised platforms fundamentally cannot compete on ease of setup. Nothing beats the UX of signing up for a centralised application.
And self-hosting Ghost is just as simple as Wordpress. Instead of sudo apt-get install'ing apache and PHP, you're sudo apt-get install'ing nginx and nodejs. The ghost installer handles the rest.