Ah, a meta blogging post. Sorry, I try to keep these to a minimum…

For those who haven’t been caught up in the hype yet, Ghost is a new blogging system that is much more minimal than WordPress and the other more popular systems. It’s designed to be much smaller and faster (plus it uses a lot of cool tools like node.js, handlebars etc).

I recently tried to set up the 0.3.3 release on FreeBSD and overall it was straight forward. Node.js is available as a port - just make sure that you’re installing the regular node port instead of the node-devel port as the latter will install node 0.11 and Ghost wants to use 0.10.

The only hiccup I encountered was that building the sqlite node module failed, but this post suggested an appropriate workaround by pointing npm at the existing install of sqlite.

First impressions are very good, populating the Ghost blog from this WordPress installation was very easy using the Ghost plugin for WordPress. The contents made it over OK, however Ghost doesn’t support comments, thus the export and re-import loses the existing comments. I’d also have to integrate an external comment system.

Overall I’m pretty excited about Ghost as a blog platform so I’ll be keeping an eye on it. For now though this blog will stay on WordPress.