In Episode #6 of the WP Elevation podcast I spoke with John O’Nolan from Ghost. I had just landed in the Netherlands after 30 hours of flights and transit from Melbourne as I was preparing for WordCamp Europe. For those of you who don’t know, John is a freelance web designer from the UK who once worked on the UI team for WordPress and recently launched Ghost, just a blogging platform, out of frustration with WordPress.
We're giving away a copy of John's favourite book at the moment "The Year Without Pants", Scott Berkun's story of working at WordPress.com for a year. Watch the interview to learn how to enter.
Congratulations Chris! John has chosen you as the lucky winner of the competition! Thanks for your contribution and keep elevating! (October 2013).
John talks about how he tested the idea for Ghost with a simple blog post that went viral and how he managed to pull off a kickstarter campaign that landed him almost £200K in startup funding.
You can reach out and thank John on his twitter @johnonolan.
John suggested I interview [GUEST SUGGESTION AND WHO THEY ARE]. [GUEST SUGGESTION], keep your eyes on your inbox.
Hint: to enter the competition, leave a comment below and tell us the feature that you don’t want to see on the future of Ghost..
16 Responses
The Feature that I don’t want to see in a Blogging Platform, Particularly in Ghost is a compromise on security (half my site build is building preventative measures into WordPress) if your building it from the ground up, don’t make it vulnerable from the start, use two step authentication as standard, don’t have a default admin username, enforce strong passwords standard, pass all comments through spamhaus or similar (as you say you will be providing hosting, John) then offering mod security and virus total as standard. Make sure all admin files are .htaccess blocked, no indexing seriously no good can come of been able to view admin files via a browser, and lastly make it easy for web designers to administer to clients, ie create more than the WordPress 5 user roles, You need a super admin for web designers. or a webmaster role, I find there is a confusion between the word administrator, as been the web administrator and the client administrator, and yes troy before you comment I try to make my client the editor role but when the client has had the site as administrator before it is hard to convince them otherwise. Even if you are offering it in an all in one solution via hosting, how about allowing web designers to manage clients through grouping them together in your system, it theoretically would reduce support time for you as you would be dealing with one person per cluster of user accounts. Like a reseller hosting program.
Certainly my two cents worth, but great interview, Look forward to seeing where you take this Kickstart John, certainly like the answers to your questions on competing on price, and in fact, pissed my self laughing with your response, and troy you started out my enjoyable hour and a bit when you saluted with a beer at the start, I thought awesome, rewound the video, went to the fridge grabbed a beer, cheers. (The benefit from working from home).
PS Troy you mentioned you would share the place in the Philippines in your notes that we all should visit, care to share.
Well spotted Chris. Proof that you actually watched the interview 🙂
Check this out – http://www.boracayisland.org/
That’s the island John and I were speaking about.
Wow, Thanks, one day soon. Where did you stay? Any Recommendations.
Don’t create a “plugin-architecture”. As soon as you let people plugin anything of theirs into it, then the whole thing will snowball out of control into a WordPress style behemoth.
Let people expand on it by forking it. Keep it a lean-mean core. A reliable foundation to extend and expand on in peoples own forks. Don’t let them extend by “plugging in”.
Don’t create a “plugin-architecture”. As soon as you let people plugin anything of theirs into it, then the whole thing will snowball out of control into a WordPress style behemoth.
Let people expand on it by forking it. Keep it a lean-mean core. A reliable foundation to extend and expand on in peoples own forks. Don’t let them extend by “plugging in”.
Boracay is great, however, you have to visit Palawan, especially the El Nido area. I know a lot of people have high hopes for Ghost and the Kickstarter was a fantastic success – inspirational.
John’s response to the question about plugins is on point – however – quality control of the plugin market will be key and some kind of vetting process would be welcome. Difficult/expensive to manage maybe. And i dont mean vetting as in – is it useful. What i mean is vetting for quality of code.
Boracay is great, however, you have to visit Palawan, especially the El Nido area. I know a lot of people have high hopes for Ghost and the Kickstarter was a fantastic success – inspirational.
John’s response to the question about plugins is on point – however – quality control of the plugin market will be key and some kind of vetting process would be welcome. Difficult/expensive to manage maybe. And i dont mean vetting as in – is it useful. What i mean is vetting for quality of code.
I don’t want to see complex e-commrec but I might want to see a simple possibility to sell downloads.
I don’t want to see complex e-commrec but I might want to see a simple possibility to sell downloads.
No eCommerce. If you are going to build a dedicated blogging platform… do a DEDICATED blogging platform.
No eCommerce. If you are going to build a dedicated blogging platform… do a DEDICATED blogging platform.
It seems a bit difficult to install and use.
I would like to see it simplify.
It seems a bit difficult to install and use.
I would like to see it simplify.
Hey Chris,
I am pleased to announce that John chose you as the winner of the competition. You will receive a separate email with some more details shortly.
Congratulations and thank you to everyone for the participating.
Hey Chris,
I am pleased to announce that John chose you as the winner of the competition. You will receive a separate email with some more details shortly.
Congratulations and thank you to everyone for the participating.
Thanks Troy, and John, looking forward to reading it.