Why I'm not using Ghost

Update - funny enough, I am using Ghost now, 3 years later. Not because I necessarily wanted to, but because my site blew up again and the only backup I had was in Ghost format. The more things change, I guess.

For my first trick, I’d like to point out why I’m using the blog engine I am, rather than the blog engine I wanted to use, Ghost.

See, I’ve used WordPress quite a few times for a number of years, and I’m bored with it. It’s too big, too cumbersome, and there are a number of security concerns that come up in the news basically once per month. I use WordPress on the 512mb DO droplet for another site I run, and I am constantly having to reboot the server due to out of memory errors. I know I can configure Apache to get around that, but I don’t want to have to. It’s one blog that gets maybe 30 hits per month. It shouldn’t be out of memory! Any sufficiently advanced technology is virtually indistinguishable from magic, and after working in IT for as long as I have, let me tell you I don’t believe in a whole lot of magic anymore.

So I wanted to try something new, something fresh, something light. 10 hours ago, I made the decision to install Ghost. Digital Ocean has a preconfigured droplet, which makes it easy. I got it up and running in about five minutes. I had to hunt for some themes, as Ghost doesn’t have a theme store integrated into the product. That’s fine. It seems like there are a lot of themes, but they all cost money. The free themes are… well they’re a starting point. And free is nice.

So how do you change a Ghost theme? Upload it via FTP then restart the Node application. No, seriously. And people put up with this for some reason.

So I run npm start, and I see…

npm ERR! Linux 2.6.32-504.3.3.el6.x86_64
npm ERR! argv “node” “/usr/local/bin/npm” “start”
npm ERR! node v0.10.4
npm ERR! npm v2.1.14
npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! [email protected] start: node index
npm ERR! Exit status 255
npm ERR!
npm ERR! Failed at the [email protected] start script ‘node index’.
npm ERR! This is most likely a problem with the ghost package,
npm ERR! not with npm itself.
npm ERR! Tell the author that this fails on your system:
npm ERR! node index
npm ERR! You can get their info via:
npm ERR! npm owner ls ghost
npm ERR! There is likely additional logging output above.

Yeah, I played with this for TEN HOURS (while I was working, so not ten straight hours…). I installed it myself on Ubuntu. On CentOS. On Debian. By hand. From NPM. With MySQL. With SQLite. Nothing.

So here’s WordPress, simply because it works. Boo.