The era of event-rich blog sites is slowly dying, giving way to clean minimalistic layouts where you are left alone with the story onscreen.
A new tidy & clean publishing platform –
Ghost, has already slipped into the house
of blogging, promising to soon emerge as
the new ‘king of the castle’.
What is Ghost all about?
Ghost is a simple, yet powerful publishing platform, which allows you to share your stories with the world with a minimum of effort on your part.
What strikes you first when you start juggling around is Ghost’s amazing simplicity of use. You can sign up in a matter of seconds and start blogging right away. No need to mess around with database configuration settings,
cumbersome installations or theme setup procedures like with veteran platforms such as WordPress, Joomla,etc. Also, the management panel is just as simple. It allows you to publish your story in seconds and to preview it as you
type.
What are the main benefits of using Ghost?
Here is a short list of the key features of Ghost, which will make you smile with relief:
Create a nice-looking,independent online story
repository – you can create everything – from a simple blog to a full-blown newspaper. The software can be fully customized to suit your
specific needs and your brand.
Tell stories faster than ever before – using Ghost’s split-screen editor, which features a Markdown syntax pane on the left and a handy
live preview pane on the right, you can type and format your draft on the fly.
Manage your content archive quickly and easily – browse through your posts as if you’re
browsing through your emails. Stay in full control of your storyflow.
Collaborate with your entire team – set up a multi-user blog to increase your team members’
involvement and share your experience in the areas in which they specialize.
NOTE: Ghost does not support automatic updates yet.
Users will need to update their Ghost instance regularly in order to reflect the latest bug fixes.
Why is Ghost a great selling point for your
business?
In order to use Ghost, your hosting provider must offer support for Node.js.
Most hosting providers, however, have not yet enabled Ghost support, since they do not have Node.js installed on their shared hosting servers.
On our platform, Node.js is readily available with all web hosting packages.
It is included for free with the Enterprise and the Corporate hosting packages, as well as with all Virtual Private Servers, semi-dedicated and dedicated servers,and is included as an add-on service with the Starter and the Business hosting
packages.
Now is the time to tap into this high-potential market of new-generation bloggers and draw more new customers to your business.
Instructions for installing Ghost on our servers:
NOTE: You need to have SSH access enabled in order to complete the setup successfully.
1. Add a new subdomain/domain;
2. If you have/want to use a dedicated IP
address, set your new subdomain/
domain to resolve to it;
3. Download Ghost (ghost.org/
download/) and unzip it in the
subdomain’s/domain’s folder;
4. Connect to your account via SSH and
navigate to the folder in question. Install
the NPM package manager using the
following command: /usr/local/
nodejs/bin/npm install – production
5. Create a Node.js instance from the Node.js section of the Hepsia Control Panel:
select the path to the index.js file in the folder where Ghost is installed;
choose your dedicated IP address (if
you have one);
enter “production” for the
NODE_ENV option;
set the Node.js status to ‘Inactive’
6. Rename config.example.js to simply
config.js;
7. Open the config.js file and edit the
following entries in the Production
section:
for “url: ‘http://my-ghost-blog.com‘”,
enter the URL of your new
subdomain/domain (ex: “url:
‘
http://blog.my-site-name.net”).
If you don’t have a dedicated IP address, add the Node.js port at the end of the URL (ex:
http://blog.my-site-name.net:26492).
for “host: ‘127.0.0.1’”, enter “0.0.0.0” (ex: “host: ‘0.0.0.0’”)
for “port: ‘2368’”, enter the Node.js
port (ex: “port: ‘26492‘”)
8. Set the Node.js instance status to
‘Active’ (from the ‘Edit’ button in the
Node.js section)
You are all set. You can visit your new subdomain/domain to see Ghost running. To access the admin panel, go to
http://blog.my-site-name.net/ghost–
if you have a dedicated IP, or to
http://blog.my-site-name.net:26492/ghost –
if you don’t have a dedicated IP.
After the setup is all done, you will be taken to the blog configuration wizard from where you can personalize your new blog with a few clicks:
We’ll soon add ‘Ghost-optimized’ labels to all packages, which come with Node.js-enabled Store Master and WordPress themes, so that you can easily target potential ‘Ghost’ users.
Tip: You can rename the Enterprise package, which supports both Node.js and SSH, to ‘Ghost hosting’, for example, to directly target
‘Ghost’ prospects.
