There are plenty of blogging platforms out on the web today. A blogging platform is a service that allows you to post content in a manner of a journal, much like WordPress, Squarspace, Blogger, or even Live Journal. A lot of these blogging platforms are better recognized and known more than others. There is one blogging platform that proves to be interesting, and isn’t very well known, and that platform is simply called “Ghost”.

Ghost solely focuses on publishing while keeping a simple yet sleek design for those web designers. It’s free to use and free to download, but it does have a service you can pay for that includes hosting and some advertisement. But let’s take a look at what this service truly has to offer.

So how did Ghost come to be? Well, back in late 2012 a guy name John O Nolan put together a post with some wireframe about his idea on new blogging platform.

After years of frustration building blogs with already existing solutions he wrote a concept for a fictional platform that would be once more about online publishing rather than building a complete website. After it got a flood of attention he realized that other people were looking for the same thing. Six months later after many hours of hard work Ghost was revealed to the public for the first time on Kickstarter. It raised more than $100,000 within the first 48 hours. Having Hannah Wolfe as the development lead for the project, the first prototype received more attention than ever before as people finally saw the platform in action. On October 14, 2013 Ghost 0.3 was released to the world.

The platform itself offers a very unique experience that other services could take note of. One of the key things that I found interesting was the dashboard. The dashboard felt alive, it was animated and alerted when posts were liked, or comment on, or even when something new was available. Colorful, simple, animated, the dashboard was starting to put a bit of excitement my way for the rest of the platform. Another cool thing is how to manage posts, and how to upload posts. Everything is done in a responsive environment. Meaning, if you were on a mobile device, it would adjust to that level and let you edit everything on the go. When you manage posts it is done within a split screen environment.

On the left side of the screen you can scroll through and select the posts you want, while on the right side you can preview the post. The posting is done in a similar way. On the left side screen you write everything down in a markdown language (which there is a guide within the environment to help you out with that) and on the right side you can preview your post. There was feature I couldn’t get to work, but did prove to be an interesting one. It was said that you could drag and drop an image anywhere on the environment and it would align the test around the image and post it where you placed it, but it didn’t work for me.

Everything else is down in an easy to navigate user interface, you do have the ability to develop for this platform as well. Ghost is a completely free to use platform, you can create custom themes and applications and redistribute them with no problems what so ever. There are no restrictions because the code is open and so is the MIT license. So if you want to try something new and get some practice developing, give ghost a try.