CPanel has a great 1 click installer. It just works out of the box.
Things I like about it are markdown support, and... that's pretty much it. I'm kind of underwhelmed by it.
No comment system, I had to tack Disqus on to the handlebars template file.
No statistics? It's a planned feature, but I feel like this should have been like priority one. Bloggers like to see that people are reading their material.
Slow despite being so light in features. This one suprised me; the page is so miniscule in feature that I wonder why it's taking so long to render blog pages.
No syntax highlighting built into the markdown for code support. :(
I feel like Ghost has tremendous potential but it's just underwhelming in it's current state. It's landing page marketing is fantastic, hell it got me to use it, but once I had it I was like: "is this it?"
Hmm, not only that, but it was in the frigging demo as shown for the Kickstarter. With all the extra money you'd think at least they'd get the basics right...
The editor itself is responsive and works on a wide selection of screen sizes (I've used it successfully on android phone). The markdown preview is actually an interactive UI. When you put an image markup without the link to the actual file there is a placeholder in the preview and you can just drag and drop an image to fill it. The image gets uploaded to your server and everything just works (I've tried it on my phone too).
All these things together make blogging much more fun and frictionless process. Not a bad start in the end!
I also like the fact there is already some decent themes for the engine. I personally use Ghostium that tries to look like Medium and uses all the web standards suitable for the task. You can see it in action on my blog http://nikdudnik.com
I agree, your blog is indeed slow to load. I'd guess putting varnish (or any caching proxy) in front of node would fix that, though -- have you tried?
Looks too me like the really slow part is loading assets -- are css files generated on each request? Or is there some simple tuning that can/should be done on the node server?
I'm assuming you've deployed as "production" (as per the ghost docs)? The other "obvious" thing to do is throw nginx in front, and run static assets via that (or any normal web server, really) -- but even node shouldn't be that slow assuming you have pretty low traffic?
Note, no affiliation with ghost or node -- but also a little surprised that such a simple site is as slow as it is. It's like the old wordpress (that seemingly was designed to benchmark how quickly mysql was able to do as many sequential, separate selects for a single page view as possible. AFAIK wp still does a bit of this, but the problem has been fixed by some semi-sane caching).
I think it's great. They'll have real feedback to work with and I can get it on ground floor.
That being said, I was a bit bummed to see it as a pay only option. I get it, you have to pay bills. Seriously, I get it - we just ditched our consumer product due to this fact.
$5/month is more than I'm willing to pay to try it out. And in reality, it's too much for me to pay even if I like it. That keeps me from trying it out and falling in love with it.
You know what I would pay $5/month for? A blog for my business. But I'll end up installing or signing up on Wordpress because I'm familiar with it. Because I was able to use it for free.
This mentality sucks, I know. Welcome to the consumer Internet.
Edit: I'm not suggesting that they offer a free plan. I wouldn't. I hope they focus sooner than later off the consumer market.
I think Digital Ocean (which has a $5/month plan) has a really simple Ghost installer.
https://www.openshift.com/quickstarts/ghost-with-mysql-on-op...
Stick your own alias over that bothersome .rhcloud.com and you're laughing.
Which is a huge deal for some people (myself included). I don't really trust other services to remain around, especially when doing so might put my content at risk. I'd much rather be in control of where my content's hosted, even if it means I need do some of the more fidly management and setup things.
And yes: those who are looking for a free blog would choice WP or some static system on GitHub.
$1/month would be interesting for me (and even more if I can pay with bitcoin), but I don't know anything about marketing :P
First month is free.
Using Node, while something the developers probably liked, might not have been the best decision because it severely hinders adoption by the casual users that WP currently owns.
Only a microscopic minority of bloggers blog to acquire billable hours.
Hobbyists are pretty cool paying "magazine subscription rates" as a household budgetary line item. All the spouse hears is "I'm gonna spend $30 on my hobby blah blah blah" and that goes by a lot easier than $60.
Also, don't ignore the value of "choosing" the best customers -- those willing to pay, and willing to dedicate some resources (exemplified by paying a premium). If you build a good "community" of users, they will affect new users later -- by being an initial majority.