In the world of blogging, WordPress is the undisputed leader—the PHP-based application is everywhere. Once a light-weight blogging platform, WordPress has grown and mutated. It's now more properly a full-fledged content management system than a simple blog, and it's sprawled all over the Web. In fact, I guarantee you if you're reading these words then you've been exposed to WordPress (Ars Technica switched to it as our CMS a couple of years ago). In the world of Web-based blogging apps, WordPress is the unchallenged king—we even have instructions on how to set it up yourself if you want to take that plunge.

But WordPress draws fire for lots of reasons, not the least of which is the complexity that has come from attempting to be all things to all people. The WordPress dashboard is cluttered and can be extremely off-putting for a new user. Power users unconcerned about interface clutter are more likely to be put off by its PHP underpinning, because people love to hate PHP. There are alternatives—my own blog uses Octopress, a static site generator based on Jekyll—but they often require donning additional propeller-topped beanies to set up and maintain.

And then there's Ghost. Founded by ex-Wordpress UI Group deputy head John O'Nolan and WordPress developer Hannah Wolfe, Ghost is a new blogging platform that's just unleashed the first semi-public release of its application. Development so far has been funded by a successful Kickstarter, and the application is barreling toward a full public release in the near-future (currently, only Kickstarter backers have access to the code).

Ghost is coded in Node.js, a server-side Javascript execution engine that's all the rage these days. The Ghost developers characterize Ghost as a ground-up revisualization of how blogging works; it's intended to have a very light user interface with nothing separating the blogger from the words he's blogging. Ghost is also meant to present some extremely easy-to-grok analytics in a responsive dashboard so bloggers can keep track of who's reading about what.

The dashboard isn't really in yet, but Ghost is functional enough at this stage to use in production—so we're doing just that.

The UI

I backed the Kickstarter, and I've been playing with the application over the weekend. I haven't migrated anything from my primary blog over, but it's certainly been a fun experience to get going. The interface is sparse but refreshing—on logging in, the user is presented with a dual-pane view listing posts on the left and a preview of the selected post on the right. There's an obvious green "+" button to add a new post, and the default typography is light and clear without a serif typeface to be found. Across the LAN and on a lightly loaded server, all aspects of the UI are lightning-quick.

The dual-pane layout extends to editing, too. On creating a new post, the application presents the user with an edit pane on the left and a live preview window on the right. Markdown is the language of choice with Ghost, though the presence of a small "MARKDOWN" note above the text entry window hints that additional parsers might be offered via plug-in later.

The live preview is responsive and sprightly, quickly converting your Markdown text to pretty final text. It's an improvement over an older "WYSIWYG" editor, because it's easy sometimes to get trapped in complex layout loops with a WYSIWYG editor—things that should be simple result in stupid amounts of code and get worse the more you try to fix them. Here, you're writing the code directly and also seeing the result immediately. Markdown's extremely simple syntax keeps the code view almost as clean as the final view. And if you get lost on some Markdown that you don't often use, like double-nested lists or whatever, there's a nice Markdown help pop-up you can consult instead of having to hit Google. Posts can be tagged at the bottom of the edit window for categorization and searching. And, in a great boon for writers who care about their word count, Ghost displays a running tally of your wordiness above the preview window.

The posting engine is currently a very simple one. Posts can be in draft or published. A published post can be un-published and turned back into a draft if needed, but there is no system of scheduling posts to publish at certain times. When creating a post, you have the option of specifying a custom URL. Otherwise, a URL generated from the post's title will be automatically used.

Adding images to posts is beautifully done—images can be dragged directly onto a target in the edit window. The application automatically uploads those images to a directory on the Web server and embeds the image into the post you're writing.

There currently aren't that many settings to tweak, since Ghost is still early in its development (the version released to backers is "0.3.0"). You can supply a custom title and title page image for your Ghost blog and do a small amount of customization on how the front page looks. You can also specify alternate themes, though the default theme, called "Casper," is the only one officially available right now.

Another thing currently missing is multiuser support. The 0.3.0 launch version of Ghost allows you to create a single user when you log onto the system for the first time. That's it—for now anyway. The Ghost team will be adding support for multiple users (and, presumably, some role-based security to go along with that support) in the future.

The big missing feature, of course, is the heavily touted dashboard. It looks nice, and it certainly has some fancy animation effects on it. However, in the interest of getting a functional release out the door to the Kickstarter backers, it's not yet implemented.

Responsive by design

The Ghost editor window and the publicly visible reading interface both eschew dedicated mobile themes in favor of responsive design. For those not totally up on the lingo, this means that as the browser window gets narrower, the page elements resize and rearrange themselves to fit. This allows a single, well-planned layout to look good on anything from a smartphone to a wall-sized screen. When editing posts on a small-screened device, the editor window goes from two panes to a tabbed layout. You lose the live preview but keep screen real estate for editing.

Published posts have some nice, understated chrome added to them. RSS is automatically generated, and posts have Twitter, Facebook, and G+ share buttons automatically appended to them for easy sharing. Plus, the buttons rearrange themselves appropriately as the page dimensions change, just as responsive elements should.

A word on setup and the hosted future

There are lots of things that early adopters will want to jump in and start tweaking. For now, getting at all but the most basic settings requires digging into the code yourself. There's no easy option to modify Ghost's visual elements, nor is there an interface-driven way to add or remove plug-ins. Themes, too, must be manually installed and removed via the command line rather than through a GUI.

Right now, Ghost must be run on your own, but the Ghost designers have positioned their hosted offering as being a major portion of the Ghost experience. According to the Kickstarter and the features page, the hosted version will be "the most powerful way of running Ghost." We'll keep tabs on it, but in the spirit of our past coverage, we'll focus a lot more on actually setting up and running self-hosted Ghost once the platform reaches maturity.

Seeing for yourself

Though there's only a single post to poke at, you're welcome to check out my self-hosted Ghost set-up for yourself—it's at ghost.bigdinosaur.org. I'm currently reverse-proxying the actual Node.js application behind Nginx, and static assets are served via Varnish (check the headers). Responsiveness with a single post is obviously quite nice. And keep in mind that the Web server is being used to host several other production sites, including a Ruby-based Discourse forum.

For only being a semi-public beta release, the software is extremely polished. For a single-user site that doesn't need post scheduling, Ghost is already perfectly functional and eminently usable. Folks leaning on WordPress for light personal blogging would do well to consider Ghost—it's nice, it's light, and it's a lot more suited to the task.