I’ve become interested in Node.js and Markdown lately, so when I heard about Ghost I was really excited. I’ve been using Wordpress for quite a while now and I wanted something simpler.
I cloned the Ghost repo from GitHub, followed the directions and had it up and running in a matter of minutes. I run this site on a little Digital Ocean Droplet with 512 MB of RAM. It’s cheap, and for the low amount of traffic my site gets, it’s fine. With Ghost instead of WordPress and MySQL, I’ve gone from about 75% memory utilization down to about 35%. The kernel would sporadically kill the MySQL process when there wasn’t enough memory, which was a pain.
So far, I’m happy with Ghost. I love the post editor. You write Markdown in the left pane and the HTML preview is updated in real time! It has support for static pages, but they don’t show up in the menu. Ghost is only at version 0.4 at the time of this post, so I’m sure that feature is coming sometime soon!
Maybe the new software will encourage me to post more often!