So I’ve been off Ghost for a while as I was busy with other stuff. I was on Ghost 0.xx earlier and had to upgrade to the latest and greatest version (obviously, since this is after all, an experiment).

We still need to enter SSH and do it. There isn’t a web-only click based thing that you can do to upgrade yet. I’m sure it will come. What has come is a breath of fresh air, to be honest.

First, I upgraded and installed Ghost-CLI and configured Ghost to use an SQLite database instead of the default needy MySQL database (this is a very small blog).

Now when I need to upgrade, I just need to go to my web server directory, cd to ghost/ and run ghost update.

And that is it. You’re done. Much better than the previous manual method!

This time it took a step extra. I needed to execute the npm install --producton command that I used at the time of first install. Maybe it was because I upgraded after a while or some key libraries changed.

Will check tomorrow and update.

So, I logged into the Ghost admin panel and saw an update notification staring back at me. Remember my first update?

I didn’t read the changelog. I simply decided to update. This time it was simple. All I did was backup my Ghost directory, wget the latest release, unzipped it (overwriting everything) and restarting the Ghost service. It works fine.

Still not as simple as WordPress, but painless for sure. I think theme updates are more painful.

So, as a part of managing a blog, installing software updates and patches are important to keep your blog secure and relatively bug free.

I was greeted today in my Admin page that a new update to Ghost was out. This was Ghost 0.11.1. Frankly, I don’t even remember what version I was on.

Normally, I wouldn’t care for the update until it really brought some serious, crazy super-cow powers. But then this is not supposed to be normal. As a part of this experiment, I need to do this. So I headed to the "How to Upgrade Ghost" page and stared at it for 5 minutes before realising how much simpler this is on WordPress. I mean you just click "Update" and it takes a few minutes or seconds and you’re done (of course the ugly part of the process comes when plugins and themes start to misbehave at times but that happens only after a very major upgrade). But, dedicated to the experiment (for myself more than others, wait, others who?!), I decided to do it.

So, the process was not straightforward as a 1-click. It involved taking the blog offline, removing the engine files, making a copy of my content, extracting new files on to the web-server path, resolving dependencies and installing (this was just one command so that was good), realising that I need to also clear the cache, clearing the cache and finally seeing it work.

You’re now looking at a blog with the latest Ghost installed (as on this date it is 0.11.1). It won’t make much of difference to you (or to me for that matter) but it should be slightly improved, I guess. You can see the changelog here.

So yeah, that’s done.

The most noticeable feature that Ghost has, I mean in comparison with WordPress, is the clean Markdown text editor. I am slightly partial to Markdown over rich text editing for some reason.

The sheer simplicity of the engine makes me want to use it even more. I mean let’s face it, WordPress must have a trillion more plugins/ themes/ features, you’re almost spoilt for choice but this is so simple.

Getting it up was fairly simple. Install Node.js from their official repo, unpack Ghost (The most popular Node.js blog engine), set up the background process, map to port 80 in the httpd, and you’re done. Took a total of 35 minutes but it was 5 minutes, really.