Welcome to Ghost

Ghost is not new to me. I've patiently waited while the software matures to the point that I can migrate away from my current Atlassian Confluence setup that I have been running since 2008.

Confluence is (was) great, but for personal use it's simply a piece of complexity that requires huge amount of resources to properly run (Java! I'm looking at you!). Instead, I've taken on the quest to find ways to make things thinner and lighter. I'll export my old legacy stuff for archiving purposes and will just try to let it go...

Before that happens though, this article will remain my testing grounds.

Node Bulletin Board

NodeBB and Ghost seems like were made to complement each other. A lot of the philosophies are shared. Namely Markdown has been made centerpiece for formatting.

When a Ghost entry is greated, NodeBB topic can be created to handle the comments. This is great! However, one thing to keep in mind is that the stub that gets created in NodeBB is not updated and only reflects the content of the article at the time of creation.

Confluence vs Ghost+NodeBB

Projects and pages

Confluence was about creating a "space" for a project and then arbitrary number of pages and sub-pages with content under that space. However, for smaller personal projects NodeBB allows similar content management. Categories and sub-categories represent the "space" and a thread a particular content page.

Blog

In Confluence, Blog was just a special content within a space and a lot of effort was put into making the Blog section look something more interesting than the vanilla Confluence site. Ghost as a publishing platform is much more elegant for those purposes and the theming options are endless. However, the basic "casper" theme is so modern and clean that I don't see any immediate reason to switch to something more custom. However, I've tweaked some of the css to make the site more "me" in terms of switching to a monospace font. There are plenty of free and commercial Ghost themes available. One possible caveat seems to be that many of them are out-of-date when it comes to supporting all the newest features of Ghost...

Sharing access

Confluence was connected to Atlassian Crowd, an identity management solution that made it easy to propagate single identity over multiple Atlassian products. Still the requirement was that the use account was registered within the Crowd itself and for personal projects, again... too much overhead!

Sharing access to particular category within NodeBB has been made easy. The access management is really fine grained and the user can utilize different authorities to log in to NodeBB.

Access to Blog isn't restricted, as well.. that's the idea of the Blog, these are public postings after all.

Testing

This quote block!

--Cool!

This is a code block
Here every line is rendered
As entered

Tables

Unforuntately, the native markdown extension for tables is not supported. Ghost proclaims that all HTML is valid markdown, so one must enter tables like so:

Credits

Post cover image by faxdoc licensed under terms of Creative Commons