The popular Ghost blogging system has been in Freedombone for a while. Recently I was trying to update it using the current Node LTS version (8.9) but not getting very far. The command line app had its option to specify the user account deprecated, and that seemed to be an important feature without which the installation process became a lot more complex.

I was struggling to get the ghost command line to work without a lot of errors and was also thinking that it's 2018 and surely blogging software doesn't need to be this complex to administer. The essence of blogging software is pretty simple, and probably it doesn't require these thousands of javascript dependencies.

So I've decided to remove Ghost from Freedombone for now. Instead I've replaced it with Bludit. Bludit is much simpler and easier to install. It has no database, so moving it from one domain to another or making backups is just copying a directory. The amount of RAM needed is negligible, so it should run even on the most minimal single board computer. It also of course supports RSS via a plugin.

Perhaps Ghost will return in future, but for now I think Bludit is a better option for self-hosting. When you're self-hosting web systems it's not just the bling which matters, but also the practicality of maintaining the system over time and on low cost hardware.

This means there are now two blogging options on the server version of Freedombone - Bludit and HTMLy. Both are databaseless and written in PHP.