1. Clone the repo and drop the jekylltoghost.rb file into your Jekyll site’s _plugins directory.
2. Run jekyll build.
3. There should now be a ghost_export.json file in your _site directory, which you can copy and import into Ghost.

To import the JSON file, you just need to visit http://example.org/ghost/debug/ in your browser and look for the Import section.

Of course, this plugin is fairly limited. Both because of the simplistic nature of the original WordPress plugin I used as a guide, and because Ghost itself is brand-new and has many unimplemented features. This is pretty much just the posts, tags/categories and standard YAML front matter. Enough to get your words into Ghost, with the same permalinks and publication dates. Images will have to be dealt with manually, at least for the time being. (Basically, you just need to copy them from your Jekyll site to the appropriate folder in your Ghost installation and manually fix the paths in the posts.) But, hey, it’s open source. Fork it and hack away!

Jekyll-to-Ghost Exporter [GitHub]

Ghost is simultaneously an attempt to mesh blogging’s roots with the state of the art. Eschewing PHP, Ghost is a Node.js app built upon the Express framework. All of the blogs I’ve visited thus far that are running Ghost have been very speedy, a feat that is difficult to pull off with WordPress, in my experience.

The Story

Ghost is the brainchild of John O’Nolan, former Deputy Head of the WordPress UI team, who last year put together a series of wireframes for a conceptual blogging platform that focused purely on writing and publishing, rather than enabling the management of any type of website under the sun.

…it’s about publishing—which means writing—rather than mashing a few buttons to make sure that everyone can see and appreciate your latest funny picture/status, which is surely the most funny picture/status you’ve ever posted. — John O’Nolan

Just a few months later, the project was announced on Kickstarter. It raised over 196,000 pounds during the campaign, well over the 25,000 pound goal.

Fast forward to the present and Ghost is finally nearing its public release. If all goes well, it should launch on October 14, 2013. It’s still a work in progress, and some things like the dashboard aren’t fully implemented yet, but the public will finally get to kick the tires and participate in the development.

Why I’m Excited

• I like Markdown. It’s a great way to write. I’ve tried Jekyll, and while there’s a certain allure about static blogs, there’s a slightly larger barrier to getting your post out than typing it in and pressing a button. I have a pretty good workflow set up for my personal blog, but it’s still enough of a hassle to annoy me at times. Ghost has a beautiful editor that works exactly like Mou the two-paned Markdown editor I wrote this post in.
• I like the idea of a platform that is minimalistic, with plugins providing more functionality. It keeps the core leaner, which can only be good for performance.
• Let’s face it, WordPress is full of cruft. The codebase is pretty clunky, mostly in the name of backwards compatibility with ancient (i.e. terrible) plugins that the core team doesn’t want to break. It has its own implementation of Magic Quotes since recent versions of PHP ditched it, for crying out loud! The developers can redesign the interface all they want, but the kludgey codebase still lurks beneath.
• While WordPress started out as a blogging tool, it’s become more like Drupal and other CMS frameworks that want to be the be-all, end-all tool used for managing complex websites. If you want a straight-up blog, it’s overkill. (Plus, I’m becoming more and more dissatisfied with PHP for various reasons.)
• There are several major companies backing Ghost. Envato and WooThemes, to name the two that I find the most intriguing. There have been many upstarts in the blog platform arena over the year, but few have had major industry leaders backing them right out of the gate. That’s a pretty big deal.
• It’s new, and I want to get under the hood and play with it!

But…What About Shared Hosting?

The biggest recurring criticism I’ve seen voiced about Ghost is that it’s built on Node, while most of those cheap shared hosting offers from places like HostGator, GoDaddy, and their ilk are PHP-only.

Here’s the thing: cheap, commodity PHP hosting is—or should be—a thing of the past. Why pay $5-10/month for space on a slow, oversold shared server? You can pay $5/month for a VPS from DigitalOcean with 512MB of RAM and 20GB of storage on an SSD. $10/month will get you a gigabyte of RAM and 30GB of storage.

For equal pricing to shared hosting, you can get a virtual server with guaranteed resources and full control over the box. It’s a no-brainer.

Sure, some people might not be comfortable setting a VPS up, but

• They can learn. It’s not difficult. You just need to run a few commands to install packages, maybe edit a few config files, and you’re done. If you can learn to install WordPress and use it, you can learn how to apt-get install [whatever]. Or in the case of businesses, hire someone who does.
• Someone else can do it for them. I imagine this is often the case with people using shared hosts, anyway. Some shared hosts even use things like “Fantastico” to automatically install popular PHP scripts on their customers’ accounts. Such a thing could be offered for a JavaScript-centered hosting environment as well.
• A user who doesn’t need the flexibility of a self-hosted system can use a hosted solution. Just like many WordPress users opt to use WordPress.com, so may Ghost users. O’Nolan plans for such a service to be offered, eventually.

Mark your calendars!

First, I released my own (GPL licensed) theme to augment the small number of available themes. The theme, which goes by the name of “Solar” for its use of the Solarized color palette, can be downloaded and demoed on GitHub.

That was a start, but what few publicly available themes exist are still spread thinly across GitHub and who-knows-where. Jekyll lacks a central repository like WordPress has had for years. So my next project was to attempt to bring as many of them as possible into one easily browsable place. I picked up the JekyllThemes.org domain, made a simple responsive showcase design for it and published the site. As of this writing, there are eight themes featured in the gallery, with links to their home pages and demo links if available.

Jekyll Themes is on GitHub, so if you have a theme to add, you can fork the site and add it yourself.

Interestingly, there are two parties who are partially at fault here for what is basically a misunderstanding, and neither one is the blogger.

Users of link aggregating sites like Reddit are browsing the site because they want to be pointed in the direction of interesting content.

Frequent readers of blogs in the style of Boing Boing are looking for the exact same thing, albeit curated by a smaller staff of bloggers rather than community mob-rule. Boing Boing is the type of site that exists more to aggregate others’ content than to produce original material. Their audience is their regulars, not social media. (Or, at least, it should be.)

So what’s the problem here? It’s not user who cries “blogspam,” and it’s not the blog that produces little in the way of original content; the issue is the user who submitted an aggregator to an aggregator. It would be equally silly for Boing Boing to link to a Reddit URI that links to original content. (This is even more ridiculous when you have a page linking to a page that links to the original page…)

This is an important bit of linking etiquette. One should always link directly to the original source, rather than a secondary aggregating site, unless said aggregator is adding new information or quality commentary to the equation.

Back in the earlier days of blogging, things were different. Most of the popular content management systems that blogs ran on were static page generators, like Movable Type, the package that previously held WordPress’s throne, before a price increase caused a mass exodus in 2004. Movable Type stores your content in a database, like WordPress, and it has an administration panel where you manage your content and adjust settings. But that’s where the similarities end. Instead of assembling pages dynamically, the blog engine compiles them into static HTML pages ahead of time, so the web server can just throw them back to users instantly. It’s a lot easier on the server that way, which can result in a snappier web site and less chance of your site going down from a social media bump.

This is, of course, something of a simplification. Many WordPress users, especially those with larger sites, use caching plugins like W3 Total Cache to have the best of both. The dynamic model is used, but frequently-accessed pages are statically cached for performance.

Something I’ve noticed recently is that some bloggers are making a return to the old days, using modern static page systems that are even simpler. Jekyll, Hyde, Pelican and Toto are lightweight blogging applications written in Ruby and Python. They don’t use databases at all, instead preferring flat files checked in to a Git repository. You write your posts in your preferred plain-text editor, name the file appropriately and check it in to the repository, then run the script from the command line. It iterates through the files, merging them with your theme, and outputs static HTML files.

It’s not terribly accessible to people who don’t know their way around a command line interface—and version control software, for that matter—but it certainly reduces the hardware required to serve the site up. You don’t need a database daemon running, you don’t need PHP. Just your HTTP server, whether you prefer NGINX or Apache, sending static files along when somebody asks for them. You can even run the script on your local computer, and push the compiled pages to any web server.

Another issue is that these new lightweight blog engines don’t have commenting built in. You will have to use something like Disqus or IntenseDebate, unless you build your own alternative that can be included with JavaScript.

All in all, I find the idea very intriguing. I don’t think I want to give up the ease of use (or plugin support) that WordPress offers for this blog, though. I did consider switching to Jekyll or Hyde when I revamped my personal blog recently, but didn’t commit to it.

Further Reading

• Getting Started With Toto, a Tiny WordPress Killer
• How To: WordPress to Jekyll
• Building Static Sites with Jekyll
• Hyde Documentation
• Pelican Documentation
• Octropress — a “blogging framework” for Jekyll

Guess which posts on this site receive the most new comments every week. Older ones. Not the latest posts, but the ones that have stood the test of time and still have people looking.

The terms sometimes used to refer to posts that remain relevant, and bring in traffic, for years are “evergreen content” and “pillar content.” I have posts that are a few years old, are still the most popular in terms of traffic, and gain a couple new comments every month. Occasionally a spam comment will appear on those posts, but they’re outnumbered by legitimate comments, continuing a discussion that has been going on for a long time. Does it really make sense to put an end that, and frustrate readers who arrived a little late but still have questions to ask or opinions to voice, just to avoid a few spam comments Akismet happened to miss?

That seems like a wasted opportunity. Instead, you could update your evergreen posts to remain relevant, and add some links to more recent posts on the same subject. Build user engagement and keep the discussion going.

Smaller blogs, especially, can’t count on timely social media-driven traffic. They tend to succeed more with long-tail traffic from search engines. Obviously you won’t get very many comments at all if the form gets disabled just when a post is becoming popular…

Fortunately, there is a nice middle ground. Some posts, especially ones that have attractive keywords in them but become less relevant later down the line, rarely see legitimate comments but are magnets for spam. I have a couple that seem to get a handful of spam messages that sneak past Akismet every week, but never have real comments anymore. With those kinds of posts, you could probably toggle the discussion off without inconveniencing anybody but spammers.

A “learning curve” is a visual device used to illustrate the average rate of learning for a skill or tool. Essentially, it is a line chart that shows the learner’s level of proficiency and how it changes over time.

Take a look at the two following charts. The first one illustrates a steep learning curve, while the second shows a more gradual slope. If you take a look at the labels on the axes, you’ll note that the steep curve shows the “knowledge” unit is increasing at a faster rate. That means something with a steep learning curve is easier than something with a gradual slope. Make sense?

I know I’ve been guilty of misusing this term in the past, but have been making an effort to avoid it more recently. It’s a good thing to word around when you’re writing, as using it in the correct context is likely to do nothing but cause confusion at this point. (At least, for general audiences. Depending on your niche, your readers might understand.)

I have asked myself that question countless times. You too have probably spent hours trying to think up a concept for a post on your blog. Inspiration comes and goes. It’s the curse of the writer.

Even worse: you think of a great idea while you’re raking leaves or waiting in line somewhere, only to forget it by the time you are able to sit down in front of a computer.

I have a solution for both problems, and it’s incredibly simple. Keep a file of post ideas. It could be one of those nifty Moleskine notebooks, a text file on your desktop, a shoebox full of scrap paper you scribbled notes on or—my personal favorite—the wonderful cross-platform Evernote software.

Whenever you have an idea, make a note of it. When you need an idea, withdraw one from your stash.

Easy, right? As I said before, I like Evernote. I have a notebook for post ideas on each of my blogs. If I find a web page worth writing about, I can clip it into Evernote using the “Site Memory” bookmarklet. If I think of something interesting while I’m away from a computer, I can punch it into the iPhone app. I can even take photos and save them into the notebook.

Seeing as many of you are bloggers, it’s not too great a leap to assume that some of you might be interested in trying your hand at fiction. What better motivation than a deadline and Internet Fame and Glory™?

Have an idea for a novel? Register at NaNoWriMo.org and try to clear your November calendar of time-consuming distractions. If you set aside some time each day to write at least 1666 words, and don’t slack off during your writing time, the project shouldn’t keep you from doing other things.

I’m probably going to give NaNoWriMo a try this year, finally. What about you?