I'm a fan of simplicity.
This blog is simply a static site hosted on GitHub pages and powered by Ghost to make administration easy. To make it look good, I skinned it with a theme from ThemeForest.
However, Ghost doesn't generate static content out-of-the-box. So how did I do that? Buster, a static site generator for Ghost. The README isn't too great for Buster, so luckily I found this great tutorial (see the last step below).
How to imitate (and flatter) me
If you're a developer, then you can get started by following these steps:
- Download the latest Ghost release and extract it.
- (Optional) Place your Ghost theme in a new folder in
content/themes/. - Run
npm installto install Ghost's dependencies. - Edit the url in the
productionsection of/config.js. - Start Ghost:
npm start --production. - Admin your blog at: http://localhost:2368/ghost/ (that's the default url).
- When your blog is ready, follow this guide to get Buster set up and deploy to GitHub pages: Ghost static site generation with Buster.
If you're not a developer, don't bother with following the above steps. I recommend going with a hosted solution of Ghost.
Keep in mind that although your static site will be versioned on GitHub, you should probably set up version control for your source, too. However, since the source may contain a database with your password in it (Ghost uses sqlite by default), you may wish to keep your source private (tip: gitlab offers free private git repos). I also recommend placing static in .gitignore, since the contents of that folder are what is versioned on GitHub pages.
Alright, that was fun! Let me know if I missed anything.