WordPress and Blogspot are two names synonym to the blogger industry. These two services are so popular that as soon as you hear the name blog, it immediately paints a picture of either a WordPress blog or a Blogspot blog. Both of these services started out as simple and clean blogging frameworks but as of today both of them have advanced to a much higher website level.
WordPress has actually managed to spin a whole new different industry for itself. The success that both of these platforms has enjoyed has created a lot of opportunities but in this race the loyal but simple blogger has found himself lost and confused. Aiming to fill this void, a new blogging platform has been introduced by the name of Ghost Blogging Platform. It is much simpler yet equally effective and is gaining huge popularity with every passing day.
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Introducing Ghost:
Ghost is an open source blogging platform; it means that you can mould its code according to your own requirements and preferences. It has been created by John O’Nolan and Hannah Wolfe. Besides being open source it is registered under a nonprofit ghost foundation.
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History:
The founders of the ghost blogging platform, John O’Nolan and Hannah Wolfe were keen to develop a blogging oriented modification of WordPress that was equally effective but a bit light weight. John O’Nolan mentioned this in a blog post and after receiving overwhelmingly positive response he started work on the ghost platform. It was officially released for public in October, 2013. However the development work is still in progress.
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Business model:
The ghost blogging platform is completely open source and is free to be downloaded and used. Along with the content management software from ghost, there is an optional web hosting service from the ghost itself. However, unlike the platform itself, the web hosting service is not free. Since its open source and free, many third party companies have sprung into action and have started to offer web hosting services for ghost blogs.
A major web designing firm known as WooThemes has also partnered with ghost and has developed some free and premium themes intended for those bloggers who wish to blog on this platform.
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Platform:
Ghost has been developed in a server side JavaScript execution engine known as Node.js. The entire look and feel and interface of ghost has been designed to be as simple as possible. But this simplicity must not be mistaken for lack of functionality. Ghost still offers the same level of functionality as WordPress and Blogspot offer to their users.
In fact the simple design of ghost makes it much more desirable for a blogger as compared to more complex blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogspot. Since it is still under development, you can expect the functionality to be refined and increased.
Even though the development work on Ghost is still going on, some industry experts have commented that Ghost will soon takeover WordPress, Blogger and others as the most widely used Blogging platform.
Jonathan Griffin is the editor of Best Host News, a site dedicated to reporting on decent web hosting related consumer news.