A lot of hate for ghost here but I'm a paying subscriber and love it. Building a custom theme is really easy (found it much more pleasant than WP) and they give you enough hooks in to the core engine to largely achieve whatever design you need.
The interface and post editor is a piece of cake to use. The only bit that I think still needs work is the separate account management interface - lots of room to improve the UX.
Agreed, they're sticking to their core strength, and I feel are executing their vision quite well. It's depressing to see snide comments about both the company and the amount of money they're making.
Some people have a completely unrealistic view of how much money is needed to run a company outside of SV/how much money is needed to live more or less worry free. Considering the revenue, and living outside of bubbly salary areas (John O'Nolan lives in Egypt for example), they're all living a comfortable life on their current paychecks, and as the revenue continues to grow, it's only going to get better. They aren't beholden to anyone, run a successful open source business and are growing nicely every month. If that's not a great story, I don't know what is.
As a reality check for SV folk, according to their report on how they spent their Kickstarter money (http://blog.ghost.org/year-2/), their gross starting salaries were 4500 $ per person (18k for 4 people). Warm word of advice, spend time in other cultures :).
Agreed! I was hosting my own Ghost but decided I loved it that much that I'd rather let the updates be automatic and let them deal with all the hosting issues. More than happy to be giving my money to them.
I will be honest. I use ghost as my blogging platform for about a year, and in comparison to wordpress... it just doesn't hold up. Everything from stuff as big as upgrading, mid range as plugins, and even simple things like spell check were overlooked (at least in the version I have). It kind of reminds me of the Pepsi Vs. Coke test. Went to it for that initial appeal of simplicity.. and now am very dissatisfied due to how much its lacking.
> Went to it for that initial appeal of simplicity.. and now am very dissatisfied due to how much its lacking.
I am reminded of (but unable to find...) the Joel on Software essay that noted that it's always trivial to write simple, unbloated software, until people realise that they all have a different, lightly overlapping 10% of features that they need.
Most people use the same basic features -- let's say they use 18% of same stuff, and 2% of more unique to them features.
The rise of "lightweight" apps that tons of people use has proven that taking out the bloat is possible for most people (e.g. casual users can work with Pixelmator or Acorn just fine, don't need Photoshop).
Totally depends on the particular software and the market it serves. Mass market stuff I think lends well to simplified designs.
Vertical market software tends to have very specific requirements which are unfortunately not agreed upon by all of the big players in the industry. So you can simplify it, but if your software doesn't support X, Y and Z then you can't sign Corporation Foo. And you start getting feature requests (er, orders some might say) from your bigger clients who are paying for thousands of subscriptions/licenses. But Corporation Bar doesn't like that - so it has to go in as an option/preference. Repeat this process for about 5 years and you have what appears to be a bloated piece of software.
OTOH, sometimes you might be building something that gets beginners into something, before they need those extra features. E.g., I don't yet blog, and if I were to, starting out with Ghost or similar would be very appealing. Only later would I understand what I need/want enough to roll my own.
And the problem with those features is that the graph isn’t linear but exponential. The last 10, 1% of features are always 90, 99% of the work, and the thing that dissuades people like me from using something else without those features.
Proper Markdown and footnote support is usually one of those things.
Keywords in URLs are useful for automated searching (eg "@ keyword" in Firefox's 'awesomebar'). Human readable URLs seem like pretty good things for usability to me, perhaps he has them but has these terse ones for archival purposes?
Nonetheless it's an interesting question - hundreds??
This reminds me of 10X rule [1] - "A technology needs to be 10x better than a previous one for widespread adoption". Although, the initial appeal of Ghost as a cleaner, sleeker blogging platform seems attractive, if that's the only thing you want to sell, then I am not sure how successful you can be.
Is there a reason, why someone can't use a similar theme and markdown plugin with wordpress to achieve the same?
That seems rather disappointing considering the amount of hype the project got with the kickstarter, and then launch, etc.
I've played around with an install and ran a blog on it for a bit, and was never too impressed. The functionality and features all seem simplistic (Which isn't a bad thing in itself), but made me wonder why I had to download what felt like hundreds of packages with npm when I installed it.
Even with all of the features they promised in the kickstarter that have now been cut, I never quite understood why they needed so much funding to create the project.
I hope they are able to do better in the future, if only to have a good alternative to WordPress, and to maybe deliver on things that they have shelved.
Edit: Looks like ghost has 38 direct dependencies in NPM, of which many have their own dependencies, etc.
> Edit: Looks like ghost has 38 direct dependencies in NPM, of which many have their own dependencies, etc.
That's awesome! There's so much bad JavaScript around where someone writes their own case insensitive sort() function, or their own state machine, or scrapes wikipedia for ISO codes or currencies rather than using country-data.
It looks like ghost is working on the parts that actual deliver value to their users and letting common, well maintained projects do the common stuff.
I guess you're implying that all those packages out there aren't as poorly-written as it would be if someone wrote it themselves? Have you actually looked through some of those packages published on npm and depended on by huge projects?
I pick modules with a long maintenance history, frequent releases, lots of contributors, lots of stars, passing tests and great documentation. So do most people in npm - you can tell from module popularity stats.
I've been working on a lot of node stuff and lately I've been noticing how crazy big some of the dependency trees end up becoming. So I just did a quick check on ghost: currently there are 487 total dependencies in the dep tree when you do an `npm install ghost`
To be fair, there is some overlap. For example, "debug", a fairly common package, is included in various parts of the tree 8 times, though there are 3 distinct versions being used.
(Keep in mind these numbers are not including dev dependencies. If we add those in, the tree balloons to over 1,400 dependencies!)
The issue with the node ecosystem is that they (we?) have really taken the mantra of "Do one thing and do it well" to heart. Most of the dependencies you load are tiny and only do one thing.
Whether that's ultimately a good thing, I don't know. Maybe NPM is just too explicit in showing you everything that you installed.
But there's now this shrinkwrap thing now that promises to slim down those huge dependency trees. I haven't played with it too much yet, but smells promising.
Shrinkwrap doesn't slim down the trees, it just makes sure the whole tree is locked to specific version, so your Linux server doesn't end up installing a different version of some package than your Mac does.
You might be thinking of npm 3, where modules are installed at the top of the tree first, and there's only extra copies of a module down the three if something specifically needs a different version of that module.
The issue is that the Node ecosystem embraces not sharing libraries so you end up with n^2 growth in packages for size. There are lots of small Ruby gems, but you can only require one version of a Ruby gem per runtime so it keeps things much smaller.
But also much more fragile. I've spent far too many hours in dependency hell on ruby / java projects when 2 packages required different versions of another package and you have to continually fiddle with versions to get them all working smoothly. I love that NPM packages have their own dependency tree so you're never stuck in that situation.
Automatic dependency resolution a-la Ruby's bundler should be required for any respectable dependency manager. In my experience, the algorithm nearly always automatically finds a successful set of dependencies, and when it doesn't, it is because I really have incompatibility that requires code changes in one dependency or another, and further verification. That isn't "dependency hell", it's just the reality that upgrades to one set of interfaces often require changes in another set that depends on them.
I never have problems with Ruby any more. Unless the gem is using the FFI or something weird it everything almost always works. In fact I've had way more problems with Node than with anything else.
Unlike you (with respect to your opinion), I found it to be absolutely perfect. I am surprised they don't make more revenue.
EDIT> Just to add more information regarding how Ghost stacks up against other free alternatives for Blogging Coders:
Jekyll
I tried Jekyll with skeleton.
Very easy installation onto github, and the fact username.github.com automatically links to your blog is great. The downside is ofcourse you have to install a them for it to be usable, and perhaps for many , having your blog edits in your official github account, may not be perfect.
Medium
I also tried medium but I did not like:
1) The constant modals asking you to log in
2) The fact Medium posts are automatically negatively ranked by HN
Just an FYI, you don't have to use Jekyll with github. The integration seems convenient, but I run it on its own to build my static site (blog) on my own domain.
I'm using my own SSL-encrypted domain while still hosting Jekyll from a GitHub repository (well, actually, a couple of GitHub repositories, one for each subdomain): https://r3bl.me
Setting a custom domain is as easy as adding a CNAME file that contains your domain (so, it'll have "r3bl.me" in my case) and changing CNAME records to point to your GitHub repository (or repositories).
SSL support is kind of hacky, but I successfully implemented it using CloudFlare.
I've recently rolled a few sites using Jekyll and Github pages. I recommend creating a new Github account or Organization (I didn't mess around with those, but it should work the same) if you feel uncomfortable pushing your blog to yourUsername@github.io.
> Edit: Looks like ghost has 38 direct dependencies in NPM, of which many have their own dependencies, etc.
This ended up putting me off. Sure, npm makes it easy to install/upgrade all the deps, but if one of the problems with WordPress is that it's a sprawling maze of potential security holes, this sort of setup really isn't the answer.
Most of the time you probably want 5% of any huge products features, the issue is everyone wants a different set. Often you can find a more focused project that works or roll your own with far less work than you might expect. Especially if you would need a highly customized version of that "huge" project.
They've proven that they've got a crank that takes in money (labour) and puts out money. The question is whether the ratio is good enough or if the right kind of investor can help improve that ratio.
Not much for a developer in the Bay Area. The article mentions 6 developers ACROSS 3 continents. If any one of them is Asia, then $40k is a very, very good income.
Don't quit your day job... if you live in the Bay Area and want to still live there.
Okay, so $40k in my local currency is 69k (BAM). Divide that by 12 and you get something like 5.8k per month. The average pay here is ~700 per month. For CS it's like 1000-1200. So, this is like 5x bigger.
>> Too low, median income for an Indian software developer is 60k in USD
I am pretty sure that figure is Rs 400k a year. Which is about $6k. That's per year. I am from India and that sounds about right. I have friends in many of the consultancy firms like TCS, Infosys, etc who are in that range. It's obviously for people early in their career but then again, it is $60k for developers early in their career in the US.
$60k is even above median in Western Europe, although that's mostly due to the anomalous high value of the USD at the moment (it converts to about 4.4k euro/month, which in Berlin would be a decent salary even for a senior dev).
The actual figure may vary, but as a rule of thumb $60k / year is 53k euro / year for fully loaded, 43.8k euro gross, 23k euro take home / year. Doesn't seems anywhere close to Berlin senior engineer salary :-).
You're not European I take it? Even in places like Italy and such, you can get like €30Κ per year and be happy about it. In most of E.U. it's even less.
Hah, OK. Thought it maybe was a typical "you make so little?" sneering response Europeans often get from US developers in forums such as HN.
Which for some places in Europe it might be a good comparison, but for others making €40K a year might get you a far quality of life than what you get in the Bay area or the US in general for $100K (e.g. larger house, better savings, insurance, 4 weeks paid vacation, decent working hours, etc).
Out of curiosity, when people talk about Western European salaries in general, are they quoting the before-tax figure, or the after-tax figure?
I ask because this practice seems to vary by country / continent quite a bit, and makes a rather large difference. So, e.g. if someone in Berlin quoted a 4.4k euro figure, would they likely mean after tax?
I agree. But we are talking about average here and the parent comment (now deleted) had linked to a Glassdoor page [1] which said that Rs 400k was the average salary of a software developer in India and the parent thought that that is a per month figure. I just wanted to clarify that that was certainly a per year figure.
My thoughts exactly. It's nowhere near enough revenue to even keep going, unless revenue is about to expand a lot without a commensurate expansion in employees or marginal costs.
I assume they're figuring this revenue would continue for a while even if they all quit tomorrow. From their August numbers their churn rate is down to 6%. Even at this rate it seems like they could make pretty good passive income if they all decided to stop working on this today and pick up a new day job tomorrow.
Not at all. He said "don't quit your day job," which is a cheeky way of saying: this is below market rate. It was a comment on the status quo; not on how things should be, but on how things are.
Entitlement would have been: "programmers deserve more than that."
Maybe he's very grateful for the high market rate many programmers can command? I know I am. Does that mean that I would advise people to go below market rate? Heck no.
Regardless of whether you feel these numbers are "impressive" or not, this kind of financial transparency is amazing and exceedingly rare. Kudos to the team, I personally use Ghost for my blog and love it.
I noticed they had 654 failed charges, and over 4,133 customers, that's 15.8%. That's around $6,200 of revenue they failed to collect first time each month - basically, a whole person's salary.
This is actually a decent first time rebill success rate. With a consumer website we see similar if not a bit worse. Recurring billing with consumers can be tricky - lots of fraud and expired cards leads to declines, which means often times you have to re-sell your value to the customer to get them to update said card.
Bigger B2B is a different beast, if you are a core piece of someones business they will not let you expire.
Yeah, so I run http://churnbuster.io/ where we help a lot of companies with this exact issue. As a rule of thumb we would typically expect about 10% of initial charge attempts to fail for a B2B business, and it wouldn't be abnormal to see 15-20% for a B2C business. It's a huge problem, and that's even on a best-of-breed payment processor that provides automatic card updating in the background.
For anyone interested in digging in deeper on some of the lessons we've learned, I posted a bunch of thoughts on Quora earlier this year: http://qr.ae/RFWy23 . Otherwise, feel free to reach out to me directly at andrew@churnbuster.io .
Ghost was one of the most disingenuous kickstarters I've ever seen: the features that got people excited got cut pretty much right away, showing that the team was never serious about it. The blog itself came to light with some heinous overlooked areas in the user management, stuff that nobody has any right to get wrong in this day and age.
My personal opinion after being a user for a while is that we need less of this kind of projects (a LOT less) and more quality software.
>Ghost grabs all the important data about your blog and pulls it into one place, so you can see it all together. No more clicking through tens of browser tabs to view your traffic, social media subscriptions, content performance or news feeds. Drag and drop the widgets most important to you into your own custom dashboard, and stay on top of your blog's performance.
Considering how important social media is for blog growth, this was a really exciting prospect for people. Being able to see all of the details on how your content was doing there, growth figures, etc.
From a little browsing, there was a quick-start package that looks like didn't actually provide early access.
Then from this update [1] they said after the first release they'd introduce plug-ins and the dashboard, of which at least the dashboard had been advertised on the original campaign rather predominantly. They were also showing off multi-user collaboration and the content tools, both of which as well got pushed to after release.
Not sure if that's what the previous posters have been talking about.
That is pretty awesome, if they can keep it lean and treble their subscriber base they could likely become operationally cash flow positive. I built a blog using their stuff, after getting to know Handlebars is was pretty straight forward, and I really like that in 'production' mode it is essentially a static page (so easy to serve lots of variable bandwidth with nginx). Haven't deployed it yet though because, well it got to be 90% done and then ... ooh shiny!
This seems like a good case for keeping your team size small. Those sort of numbers split two ways instead of six would turn this into a huge win. Hopefully they'll keep ramping upwards and find ways to avoid adding any more headcount to dip into the pie.
This also seems like a great market to have jumped on, and I'm kicking myself for not having done so. Blogger used to offer essentially this same product: Easy editing tools with FTP export so you could host raw HTML cheaply instead of having to deal with keeping a LAMP box alive to run Wordpress. But they killed it off and left a huge hole in the market that sat vacant for years before these guys stepped in to fill it.
They don't seem to be making a lot, considering all the hype surrounding Ghost for the last year or more.
I am using Ghost (self hosted) for my blog and find it brilliant but I think the ecosystem needs more time to develop and sustain itself. So the jury is still out I guess...
$411k isn't impressive and it isn't sad either. To me that sounds about right for a team of 6 just getting started. I'm sure that won't support the salaries those people could get in the valley.
There are no experienced engineers in the SFBA working for $90k unless they're choosing alternate comp over base salary. Most internships pay more than that on an annualized basis nowadays.
But you may know something I don't about these roles, they may not all be engineers?
For my use case -- a simple blog -- Ghost felt a better fit. Wordpress has so much stuff visually in the beginning that I felt I didn't need. Ghost on the other hand hides that away, and then when I started tweaking I was beginning to realize there's a lot more it than meets the eye. I guess I need that initial simplicity.
I love the platform and always asked myself how they were making money, because it isn't me (I combined it with Jeckyll and upload it as HTML).
How much money they are making is a pretty minor aspect of transparency which doesn't seem to serve much purpose except to satisfy peoples curiosity (and possibly act as a vanity metric which I feel Ghost's example reads a bit like).
Here in the UK all Ltd companies (and most startups are Ltd) have public accounts, customers in B2C businesses in my experience tend to not look up and read them because at the end of the day it's not important for them.
Publicising them so openly seems like it could backfire and create problems. Customers demanding more, putting a target on yourself for patent trolls, another thing to maintain which could go wrong/mislead etc etc.
Cynics might argue they are not doing this for customer transparency, but as an attempt to put themselves on the radar for potential investors/acquirers.
They raised money through Kickstarter, so they should answer and report to their stakeholders and have the obligation to update them with the progress/challenges they're facing/seeing in their venture.
What was this blog platform which was html only ? I remember seeing one some time ago, but I don't remember which it was. It was a very clean, simplistic way of posting things online, I wonder if it's ghost after all.
Not a clone, I've been developing a blogging platform with the same basic feature sets called CiiMS [1] since 2011, which is written in PHP. Unlike Ghost however, CiiMS has a working API, comprehensive documentation [2], and a dashboard. We also offer our own hosting as well [3].
There will be one somewhere (even though there are already a great many PHP projects covering similar use cases) though PHP isn't exactly a show-off platform these days so you'll not see it advertised loudly as "GHOST IN PHP!". Same for "Ghuse in Ruby". Maybe we'll see "Ghost in Go" or "Ghost in Clojure" soon though.
Wordpress has some undeniable qualities for quicly building simple websites. Making it a whole framework for apps and big websites just sounds silly to me.
If I need to build large webapps I don't see any reason to do it with Wordpress (or even PHP) nowadays.
To be fair, it's a common business practice now to shill your products. In order to keep one's beliefs consistent with reality, one has to assume that some Internet comments are made by shills. To assume that shills don't exist is self-deception.
Not saying that it's valid to assume a shill in this case, but my point is that American consumers don't have enough information to determine whether a product review is genuine.
Apparently, he/she is not aware of the fact that tech companies hire people, most likely techies in product evangelism related roles, to publicize their offering and also to counter bad publicity/press offering different narratives and talking points like any regular PR operation out there.
Some are good at it and can conceal their true intentions and some are not really good.
It was especially clever of them to register this account years ago, before Ghost was even invented, and pad the account with years' worth of comments to hide their obviousness.
If someone has an old account that doesn't preclude them from getting hired by other people and to be instructed by their new employer t0 use the account in promotional activities.
I am not talking about this particular person here, I'm just talking in general and in principle.
Over promise and under deliver. Apparently that's the motto of the folks at Ghost.
I'm really disappointed at the progress of this project that I thought would take on WP in 1 or 2 years time since launch but we're heading to year no 3 and they still at 0.6 milestone with no stable and production-ready WP caliber version in sight.
Shame that it had to be like this. I was really looking forward to abandoning ugly and frustrating PHP to JS/Node and bringing new life to blogging platforms but shame.
Even if the project delivered absolutely everything promised, and more, it's highly unlikely that it could gain enough adoption to challenge WordPress in any meaningful way. This is primarily due to being built on Node. One of the primary reasons WordPress is as popular as it is, is that you can install it on every single hosting provider out there and many of them provide a one-click or automated installation option. Very few hosting providers, or at least the shared and 'cheap' hosting providers have the ability to install Node and even fewer come with it pre-installed. The simple fact is that your average person that wants a website or blog will not have the knowledge or want, to go through getting all of that set up when using something like WordPress is as simple as clicking a button. Providers like Digital Ocean, are simply not a feasible option, or would even be considered by most non-technical people looking to build a blog/site.
I don't see why it would be difficult for hosting providers to adopt Node on their servers. They're already doing this offering VPS and the likes.
Also, I don't see why there wouldn't be a viable Node blogging platform that could be as user-friendly and as easy as WP if not much more. This definitely is very doable and Ghost and Co promised to achieve to do that but they failed yet to make any meaningful impact on the market.
They probably could, but it's more likely that the demand isn't enough to justify building out the required infrastructure and services to make things work properly in a shared hosting environment.
Yeah, because their huge market position (or the Kickstarter money) guarantee them being able to hit a 10+ year old project which powers 40% of the web, and has a multi-million dollar company behind it.
Shame of them for not delivering magical unicors sprinkled with pixie dust.
I was not expecting them to take on WP even in a 5 year time but I was hoping to see them grow and chip away at WP's market share and reach 20% - 30% by of the blogging platform market but two years in and Ghost still going nowhere in terms of adoption and even worse it lags behind feature-wise.
So yeah I'm really disappointed at them and equally at Assemble as well but Ghost is supposed to have had better chances of making it since they are well funded and have/had the support of the JS community to build a decent node-powered blogging platform that takes the market by storm but this yet is to materialize.
have you considered that maybe the market doesn't want a "decent node-powered blogging platform?"
Building a quality product takes time, and often times a lot longer than you think it will take. Lots of things get in the way, and with a product like this, education is a huge part of the adoption cycle. At 500k/year, they are poised to have healthy growth until they reach that point. Might not happen on your timeline, but at least they are still chugging.
Here's the real issue. WordPress is more than a blog. Ghost is only attacking the blogging aspect of WordPress. The rich themes and plugins ecosystem of WordPress cannot be matched no matter WHAT anyone thinks. Because of this, WordPress is widely used to develop all kinds of sites.
Hell there's a company in my area (sadly I worked there years ago) who literally manages 200+ local businesses sites and they're all powered by WordPress. I'd say 1 or 2 of them are actually blog having sites. The rest are just "I want to be able to edit this section of content myself" sites.
WordPress makes it insanely easy to build a site for a client or even anyone who's vaguely familiar with web development.
Go get a cheap shared hosting account, click that 1 click WP install button, login to your new site, search for a theme you like, install it in a click, make a few minor tweaks, find some plugins that do stuff you like, install them in a click. Done.
Until people realize this, there's no "taking on WordPress".
definitely. Not to mention WP's capability as an application platform. There are more PHP devs than node devs, and Ghost's adoption probably reflects that.
I think that the whole ecosystem piggybacking on WP can be matched if not surpassed. There's nothing deficient or lacking in the technologies used in a Node stack to pull this off.
We have npm already to cover the plugins functionality and on the front end it's a framework-a-palooza with libraries and themes popping every other hour.
So, it can be done and I believe it can be easier and simpler whether for the end user or the developer as developing for WP is not really a walk in the park and there's a lot of gotchas and magic involved in this daunting process.
The issue there is that the ecosystem is full of "I'd rather just install a plugin and be done" types. Nobody wants to recreate popular WordPress plugins to work in a NodeJS replacement.
"Why would I recreate this in NodeJS where nobody uses it, when I can just use WordPress?"
>reach 20% - 30% by of the blogging platform market
In 2 years? That's crazy talk. Why would that happen?
It's not as WordPress users have issues with it and are actively looking for alternatives. In fact they're more or less happy with it.
Ghost would only appeal to the more minimalist crowd, who cared that the source was cleaner etc (and I'm assuming it is, for it can also be just a jangled mess of JavaScript instead of PHP).
From their about page, they are a non-profit, so there isn't any. "Ghost(Pro) is what funds the Non-Profit Organisation which organises and runs the Ghost Open Source project."
"They made $100Bn in revenue last year, but they had a loss, so I'll probably value the company at like $0 because the concept that revenues can be turned into profit has escaped my comprehension"
The interface and post editor is a piece of cake to use. The only bit that I think still needs work is the separate account management interface - lots of room to improve the UX.