What does HackerNews think of Ghost?

Turn your audience into a business. Publishing, memberships, subscriptions and newsletters.

Language: JavaScript

#21 in Hacktoberfest
#3 in JavaScript
#2 in Node.js
You can! They are focussing on their publishing platform, but it's open source https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost, see the self hosting guide https://ghost.org/docs/install/

Edit: I see you mentioned no self hosting in an other comment, then it might not make sense for you as the hosted version is indeed paid.

If you are like me and had never heard of Ghost before today, here's a link to their Github repo:

https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost

Hello, my Namesake,

my recommendation is Jekyll, I love Jekyll for freedom and simplicity. I posted on my blog about Jekyll: http://sebastian.korotkiewicz.eu/techlog/deploy-jekyll-blog-...

And if you are looking for a cool CMS for blogging, I recommend:

- Textpattern [self-hosted] PHP (https://textpattern.com/)

- Ghost [self-hosted] NodeJS (https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost)

And this is my side-project created in one day in nodejs, everyone can write their article: - https://pbsapi.now.sh/

The very best alternative to Medium is self-hosted Ghost.

https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost

And if a person can't figure self-hosting out then the paid version of Ghost is the best option.

https://ghost.org/

Ghost is an amazing platform and it's the only blogging solution that I know of that gets a perfect Google lighthouse https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/ score right out of the box.

If Ghost made switching from WordPress easy they would totally take over the blogging space.

I don't know what's up at their HQ but if I were them I'd be making a "switching from WordPress" tool my #1 priority.

Ghost https://ghost.org/ https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost is best for the need you've described, it's no-nonsense fast as lightning, unlike bloated WordPress.
> Once you begin with the premise of “I need an open source business model”, it leads you down a path of “I need to monetize my project” rather than “I need to build a product that delivers value”.

This is exactly how I feel as well. I am working on an open source to-do list + calendar (https://getartemis.app), source at (https://github.com/satvikpendem/Artemis), and I try to subscribe to the same philosophy as Sentry[1] and Ghost[2], two popular products that are also open source but do not avoid generating revenue because of that.

One must always strive to compete, whether it be through business model, or more often, product. You can release a good proprietary product, or similarly, a bad open source product; the quality of being open source does not necessarily add nor detract from the quality of the product itself. Sure, one can `git clone` the product, but due to the other factors in the business, the "soft skills" such as marketing, branding, sales and general business development, no one can reliably copy the company still generate substantial revenue [3].

This is not to say, however, that if your company is infrastructure such as a database, that no one will copy and monetize that better than you; they may, even in general usage of the product, but what is missing is the lack of vertical integration within the product. A database is just a part used in the whole of a new product, not the whole in and of itself. That is why if I desire to make substantial revenue from an open sourced product, I would make it a fully integrated product, just as any proprietary one, and that is what I am to do with Artemis.

[1] - https://github.com/getsentry/sentry [2] - https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost [3] - https://ghost.org/about/

I'll throw in my recommendation for Ghost if others also want to move their blog to "a site they control and a company they pay":

https://ghost.org/

They provide paid hosted services, or you can self-host it as it's free and open source (https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost). Far better than wordpress. You write posts in Markdown. Editor is really nice.

Example blogs:

https://spreadprivacy.com/

https://blog.codinghorror.com/

https://articles.hsreplay.net/

This is a free open source alternative, the pro version is just a cloudbased PaaS based on the same code.

Here's the GitHub: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost

I'm not familiar, but off the top of my head GhostJS seems to do good work. Ignition is their logging service.

https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost https://github.com/TryGhost/Ignition

Most of this stuff is just from experience and knowing what you need in a production application. Can you get away with no logging/monitoring? Sure, but I'd hate to be the guy trying to debug an error. Similarly, rotating keys sucks and you never want to explain to an auditor why sensitive info isn't encrypted.

There's Ghost. Its frontend theme is reminiscent of Medium.

Link is here: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost

the deps for 1999 consist of request and a date/time lib ... cool.

someone else mentioned ghost, and i'm posting mainly to link that project

https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost

and thank the author b/c i learned a lot a/b node development from it.

If you want something more NodeJS oriented you can start exploring Ghost source code [1]. It has amazing Promise-based + express infrastructure, in which you can find a lot of patterns to help you build your next project.

1 : https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost

Ghost is coming along very nicely. From what I have followed from their development I have seen very thoughtful developers from the start.

edit to add https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost

Contribute to Ghost[1] it's a considerably new blogging node.js platform and has a fairly good bit of popularity. Having your code in the main tree, would add some points to resume.

[1] https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost

Ghost is developed using TDD. It might not be the strictest example, but a very successful one:

https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/

Choose any other random OSS, chances are it's using TDD/BDD in one form or another.

Great question. Other folks have made good points about the value of sticking with what you know but on the other hand there are advantages of other platforms as well. Could the kind of blogging application you've got in mind be built around Ghost? [1] If so then node could make a lot of sense.

I weighed a similar choice this summer and my first thought was Go but a friend suggested I look at node.js, Closure or Scala as alternatives. I wound up choosing node.js for an initial version because of the vibrant ecosystem with some great building blocks, mostly MIT-licensed.

jon

[1] https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost