Ghost: A Powerful Blogging Platform

My encounter with Ghost, not the one from the horror stories, started when I was wandering through the Internet looking for a blogging platform for my college group, which focused more on writing rather than the several options that offer plugins to do simple things. When I navigated to the official page of Ghost (https://ghost.org/), all it said was, “Just a blogging platform.” Ghost aims to be a simple, open source blogging platform focused on offering a good user experience.

Installation

Though it aims to be a simple platform, installation is not so simple for the average user. For a seasoned command line user, it’s a cakewalk. For this demonstration, I’ll be using Linux, so some of the steps will be Linux-specific. Ghost is built on node.js, and requires version 0.10.* (the latest stable version). For Linux, the easiest way to install node.js is via the available package manager, but it may or may not be the latest version. Therefore, the best way to install node. js is to download the latest tar.gz archive from http://nodejs. org/download/ to install the latest binaries from the section ‘Linux Binaries’ (if you like compiling), and then download the source code and compile. Before compiling, make sure Python is installed.

wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.28/node-v0.10.28.tar.gz

Version number may vary. tar xzvf node-latest.tar.gz && cd node-v* ./configure make sudo make install

For Mac, Windows or other OSs, download the respective installer from http://nodejs.org/download/.

If you still face any difficulties, refer to the wiki page https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-viapackage-manager

After installing node.js, it’s time to download and set up Ghost. Before downloading, make sure you have the recommended version of node.js:

nodejs -v