New blogging platform
A recent Kickstarter project funded a new blogging platform called Ghost. The creator of Ghost, although highly respectful of WordPress, as a former WordPress designer, noticed that WordPress became less about writing and content and more of a large scale website platform. So, he went back to basics to create Ghost. Basically, he felt that using WordPress to blog is like using a bazooka to kill a fly: it’ll work, but maybe it’s a little more than needed.
Although I initially didn’t get it, it seems to me now that Ghost is to blogging as WriteRoom is to word-processing. Distraction-free, basic, functional. The split-screen editor let you type markdown on the left, and lets you see the WYSIWYG preview immediately on the right. You can type most basic editing formatting in manually and let the engine bother with converting that to valid HTML. Complicated syntax is replaced by easy-to-read, more intuitive syntax.
The project will remain not-for-profit the whole time, thus the motivations behind future innovations are to serve the end-user, not to sell to a bigger fish.
If you’re an egghead and any of this is mildly interesting, look also into these plugins which attempt to port some of the best features of Ghost to WordPress:
