Interesting thing, change. One minute you're downloading Wordpress plugins for anti-spam and tag clouds, the next you're looking at the ultra-minimal, mobile-ready markdown-loving npm-installing marvel of Ghost.

Ironically, I first came across Ghost while trying to find a new Wordpress theme that i liked. Since i tend to dislike spending any time maintaining my site, I reasoned that it couldn't hurt to take a look at what Ghost offered and if it was going to be less hassle than trying to update Wordpress. In the end, the refreshing change from my usual Wordpress woes has made me a Ghost convert.

There are a few getting started notes below (leftover from the welcome post you receive when installing Ghost for the first time), but I'm keeping those as a reminder for me when i forget how markdown works (again). For anyone wanting to find out more about how migration works from blogs like Wordpress, and what this Ghost thing is all about anyway, I would highly recommend checking out http://www.ghostforbeginners.com/ which has a ton of useful info about getting setup.

The final piece of the puzzle for me was finding a way of hosting my new site using Github. By default, Ghost runs on a Node server and this did initially put me off a little as Node hosting services are still a bit of an unknown to me. However, for those looking to escape the drugery of site hosting for Ghost, I would also recommend checking out a nifty little Python plugin called Buster. This will spider a locally-running Ghost site, spitting out static pages that you can easily upload to a Github repository for the ultimate in static site generation.

Getting Started

Ghost uses something called Markdown for writing. Essentially, it's a shorthand way to manage your post formatting as you write!

Writing in Markdown is really easy. In the left hand panel of Ghost, you simply write as you normally would. Where appropriate, you can use shortcuts to style your content. For example, a list:

  • Item number one
  • Item number two
    • A nested item
  • A final item

or with numbers!

  1. Remember to buy some milk
  2. Drink the milk
  3. Tweet that I remembered to buy the milk, and drank it

Want to link to a source? No problem. If you paste in a URL, like http://ghost.org - it'll automatically be linked up. But if you want to customise your anchor text, you can do that too! Here's a link to the Ghost website. Neat.

What about Images?

Images work too! Already know the URL of the image you want to include in your article? Simply paste it in like this to make it show up:

The Ghost Logo

Not sure which image you want to use yet? That's ok too. Leave yourself a descriptive placeholder and keep writing. Come back later and drag and drop the image in to upload:

Quoting

Sometimes a link isn't enough, you want to quote someone on what they've said. It was probably very wisdomous. Is wisdomous a word? Find out in a future release when we introduce spellcheck! For now - it's definitely a word.

Wisdomous - it's definitely a word.

Working with Code

Got a streak of geek? We've got you covered there, too. You can write inline <code> blocks really easily with back ticks. Want to show off something more comprehensive? 4 spaces of indentation gets you there.

.awesome-thing {
    display: block;
    width: 100%;
}

Ready for a Break?

Throw 3 or more dashes down on any new line and you've got yourself a fancy new divider. Aw yeah.

Advanced Usage

There's one fantastic secret about Markdown. If you want, you can write plain old HTML and it'll still work! Very flexible.

That should be enough to get you started. Have fun - and let us know what you think :)

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