dataaa.net

I've been looking for a blogging platform that looks great, is easy to use, and can be self-hosted. Some new kids on the block (I'm looking at you medium and svbtle) look fabulous but aren't self-hosted, and others (jekyll) are, but are very complicated to get going¹. Ghost seems to fill the gap: it is lightweight, has a nice post creation portal (as opposed to Jekyll), can be hosted on Github, and has a ton of good-looking themes that are mostly available for free. Above all, it is easy to get set up! There is a very good post by Xavier Riley which helps immensely. I'm sure there will be problems to come (perhaps with installing updates to Ghost and/or themes), but so far so good.

Ghost partners with Buster, a static site generator which makes it very easy to 'deploy' a site to Github Pages. Once Ghost and Buster and their dependencies are installed and set up (see above link), the workflow is very simple:

> npm start --production
(starts a local Node server)

Browse to http://localhost:2368/ghost & log in

Write post

> buster generate --domain=http://localhost:2368
(which generates the static pages from Ghost)

> buster deploy
(which uploads the static pages to Github)

So far, so good.