The way to cancel a trial is to go to the billing area in the product, then click on "Cancel" - red link at the bottom of the page. That instantly cancels the trial and deletes the account.
If you don't cancel manually, and the trial ends, then we still automatically cancel and delete anyway.
John from Ghost here, happy to answer any Qs if there are any. I know HN crowd tends to have pretty mixed feeling about the utility of ActivityPub, but we're pretty excited about it. Will it work out and be amazing? Don't know - but we're see what we can do and find out.
First of all, thank you for at least giving it a shot.
One of the main problems I see with AP is account fragmentation. If I'm an author on Ghost, but also have a Mastodon account, which account should I use to follow someone on PeerTube?
It really seems like the server side should be datatype agnostics, handling activities of any type, and it should be easy to delegate access for sending/receiving activities. So for example maybe Ghost is my main account, but I can delegate some access to Mastodon and PeerTube while sharing the same actor.
I think if you were to ask an ActivityPub absolutist about this (of which I am not one) the answer would be that you follow different things from different places, and it all balances out based on utility. So the idea is not that you have centralise all your following under a single account, but rather than you can follow anything, from anywhere. So maybe you follow video stuff from a Peertube instance, and you follow longform writing from a Ghost instance - but if every so often you want to mix and match... you can.
ActivityPub, like many of 'open social' web standards before it, suffers to some extent from being invented without clear enough usecases in mind. Much like WebMentions (which we also adopted) the answer to "what's it for?" - often seems to be "yes".
So you can either try to ship the spec and support everything, or you can try to build an end-user usecase that fits within the spec, and get more specific. We tend to lean toward the latter, and try to create something useful - which would still be useful even if nobody knew it was running on [whatever web standard].
Whether we can succeed with it or not, remains to be seen :)
Then we will support it in a few months. That's how LTS works. We can't just add support for Node 18 if all the upstream packages we depend on don't support Node 18.
I'm still on the fence about this one a bit! From a product PoV — god yes I wish we just used Laravel. We'd have been able to move about 8x as fast and get so much more built for users just because the ecosystem is so much better developed. When Ghost first launched in 2013, there wasn't even an off the shelf RSS lib!
That said, Ghost succeeded in large part because it was a new and interesting Node thing, and we might never have gotten as far as we have done without that :)
> When Ghost first launched in 2013, there wasn't even an off the shelf RSS lib!
Is there a blog post or retrospective about the things y'all had to invent/adapt/overcome in using NodeJS? Your interview was the topic of much conversation where I worked at the time; we were a C# shop instead of PHP/Node but we were moving into Big Data and there was agitation to adopt every trendy language for the various bits of the pipeline (Scala for Spark; Java for Storm; Python just because) and your comments about using a stack you know well and Dan KcKinley's "Choose Boring Technology" blog post[1] were the touchstones for the "let's not get too trendy with our language/tech choices" camp.
Having started a large project in 2012/13 (which is still running), I wish I had done the same. Although, if I remember correctly, the ecosystem around Laravel was still very young at the time.
Hi HN John from Ghost here. Excited to launch 5.0 today, 9 years after Ghost first got built thanks to a popular post right here on Hacker News. We're hanging out in the comments today if you have any questions or thoughts!
Off-topic: I really liked the previous homepage you had instead.
I completely realize that the copy is largely the same (which you have amazingly good copy), but I think you're confusing the potential buyer by having an Analytics Dashboard as your hero image.
You're not an analytics product. You're a publishing platform making it easy for people to make a livelihood using your platform. As such, the hero image should be about that person and/or publishing ... not about clicks and page views.
Agreed. I've never heard of Ghost, but my thought process was roughly this as I read the article (Based on comments here, I think most of my conclusions were wrong):
- Oh, an editor that's somehow optimized for professional flows. Maybe that's worth learning.
- Nope, wait. This is an analytics product for people with lots of readers. Meh. ...vague privacy concerns...
- Looks like a "call to ask for pricing" model or something.
- I wonder if this supports RSS, or if it'll break my reading flow if it catches on. (Scroll down, see there's no rss icon). Nope. Back button.
Anyway, congrats on the 5.0 release!
(Please take this as constructive criticism, and note that I'm not your target audience!.)
Same. Someone recommended Ghost to me for my blog, went on the site and immediately "hmm, this doesn't look like a blogging platform..." Took me a couple tries to dive below the slick marketing speak to find that it is, in fact, a publishing framework.
Would you consider adding support for PostgreSQL instead of just MySQL. I realize that it can greatly complicate things, but PostgreSQL is generally a much better DB.
This is answered in some detail in the post :) Ghost uses Knex and Bookshelf, and can work with any database that is fully supported and made interoperable by those packages. So if anyone contributes to the upstream repositories, the Postgres will work automatically. The core Ghost team focuses on MySQL because we're a small team and we can only really have the resources to document and support one environment properly.
Congrats on the 5.0 launch! A few questions below...(thanks)
Back in 2013, Ghost was promoted as just a blogging tool. In contrast, WordPress had become a general publishing tool i.e. a blog, a CMS, an e-commerce store, any type of website (portfolio, news website, etc.) Fast-forward today and Ghost is also a general publishing tool that can do many of the things WordPress does.
How do you see Ghost vs WordPress today? Is it fair to say that Ghost today has become what WordPress is (i.e. a publishing tool covering the same use cases as WordPress)? Or is Ghost's scope more narrow than WordPress?
I mean I kind of wrote 2,000 words answering this in the post that these comments are about. We've always been focused on a single core usecase: Publishing, and that is still true today. WordPress diverted away from blogging and became a tool for building general websites, ecommerce stores, job boards, real estate listings, social networks (bbpress), enterprise tools (altis), and even full blown applications. In terms of diversity of usecase, you really can't beat WP for how many different things it can do.
Ghost's scope has grown significantly relative to Ghost, but - as I outlined in the post in some detail - our target usecase for the platform has remained pretty consistent, and far narrower by comparison.
All that being said: Apps have to evolve with the market, and Ghost is no exception. It's no use making something and then never changing it, because the world around it doesn't stand still.
This might be a little more out there as a question, but what's your take on future trends and web technologies ? Static vs Dynamic Sites? Will AI/Machine Learning outmode the need for CMSs/platforms Ghost or Wordpress? Are Javascript and its derivatives here to stay or does Rust or some other language have a chance at taking the crown?
The way to cancel a trial is to go to the billing area in the product, then click on "Cancel" - red link at the bottom of the page. That instantly cancels the trial and deletes the account.
If you don't cancel manually, and the trial ends, then we still automatically cancel and delete anyway.