I recently played with Medium, and ended up back using Ghost. I figured I would upgrade Ghost to the latest version, and boy was I surprised.
I wrote a post at the end of 2016 about automatically updating your Ghost install. A lot has seemingly happened in a year.
I was working with verision 0.9.0 and now I am working with version 1.5.1.
Firstly, the post linked above will not work any longer. Seemingly a lot of the internals have changed, and the install guide suggests that one just do a clean install of the latest version. That said, the newest version introduces the ghost-cli package which makes installing a simple step by step process.
The latest version of Ghost uses mySQL instead of sqllite. This would normally be a little heavier to install/setup, but again Ghost does everything for you.
Ghost even sets up an SSL certificate for you using LetsEncrypt. I did not even want/need a SSL certificate, but given how easy it is.. why not. Medium want $75 for the honour.
The new version also supports AMP pages, and has extreme flexibility as regards meta data for SEO and for social media.
Finally.. the theme. Never have I seen a default blog theme that is so good. Sufficiently good that I am going to use it.
I was in Vietnam recently, and I met a guy who on discussing Ghost noted that he knew the creator, John O' Nolan. He sent John a text message stating that he had "met a fan". I liked it then, I love it now. I highly reccomend that if you want to write a blog you use the Ghost blogging platform.
