So I just made a Ghost droplet on Digital Ocean, now what?

So I have been wanting to start a new blog for a while now. Being out of the blogging world for a bit, I knew there were some new options out there for a blogging platform. Jekyll has been my go-to choice for simple, static sites or blogs. I knew I needed something more powerful however.

I was just about to install Wordpress on my shared hosting server at Eleven2, a host I have been with for years. But then, I decided on a whim to try out Ditigal Ocean instead. Upon seeing their Ghost offering, I said “what the hell” and tried it out.

Here are some things I learned:

  • Ghost doesn’t have great documentation. At least, I feel like I couldn’t get a sense for it’s features from it’s site. It just pushes you to buy hosting from them with ghost pre-installed.

  • Ghost runs on node.js; if you’ve never used it then good luck (I’ve never used it before now)

  • Say good bye to FTP and navigating your files traditionally! Command line and SFTP is your new best friend. And did you know that ssh and sftp via the command line is not the same thing? You have to use the command line to interface with your server. (I’ve only done this a handful of times)

  • Ghost themes run on handlebars, .hbs files. (I’ve never used it before now)

And now, I guess the next thing to do is install Ghost locally and figure out how to theme with it.

Nicole wrote this on August 10, 2014 and it's probably about code, servers.
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