First thoughts on ghost

As I already wrote, I'm using ghost as blogging platform in here. I want to collect some initial thoughts on it in here.

Ghost vs. ...

I used Wordpress, jekyll and nanoc before. And I want to compare them with ghost. You may think they are not comparable, as Wordpress is a content management system, jekyll and nanoc are static site compilers and ghost is a simple blogging platform, but I think they really are!

Wordpress

Wordpress is the most known CMS out there, besides Drupal and Typo3. It is really user-friendly (or was when I used it, which was almost 3 years ago). I really like Wordpress as content management system, and maybe I have to deal around with it at the beginning of next year, but I don't like some things which it is related to... First of all, I really don't like that it is written in PHP. PHP as is, is a terrible language. I even would say it is a cruel language, as it allows things which are absolutely not sane at all. For example, this is absolutely valid PHP code:

php $nothing = NULL; $nothing->foo = "foo";

Not to mention that PHP is slow. I don't want a slow blog. I want a fast blog! The second thing is that Wordpress is big. It became just to big for normal blogging. The whole infrastructure is a mess. I wrote a wordpress theme some day, and I struggled figuring out what exactly to do and why and so on.

jekyll / nanoc

jekyll and nanoc are static site compilers. They compile content into static html files, which are much faster at loading speed (static html can be served in so much less time, you can't imagine)! Also, plain html is much more secure than some running code on your web server, as it is not hackable. The negative thing on this is: you have to do some setup. I know, there is octopress, which is really good at “click and play” and so on, but it is still too much effort for me. Ruby is slow, too! But I don't have to care, as the site compiles on my own device. It can take hours (which would be really annoying, but fortunately these static site compilers are really good optimized), I would never mind, as the pages are still served in nearly no time by the web server.

ghost

Well, ghost is not as much click-and-play as octopress or wordpress. But it is almost. And I can start submitting content to my page in almost no time. It took me one hour to figure out how to get it running on my system. I'm not familiar with this node.js stuff and everything, just read through one or two tutorials I found at google. And it works. It is not as fast as static web pages, but it is also not as slow as Wordpress. I think it works good for me in manner of speed. It is not really as much as nerdy as I usualy prefer my software to be, as it has a neat graphical interface and everything. But it works really well for me. It is not “What you see is what you get” but it has a preview for the markdown I wrote, which is really nice (I sometimes wish I would have this for the latex stuff I write)! It is really much point-and-click stuff, but I never said I wouldn't use such a thing. I just said I don't like this kind of stuff. But I think I will stick to ghost, as I really like it by now!

tags: #blog #ghost