Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

Editing Content In Ghost Rocks
You may have noticed based on tweets that I’ve been using Ghost daily (mostly) for a little while now, trying to get a feel for it vs WordPress.

You know what? With the exception of wanting to kill people while I was installing it, I really, really, like it for simple blogging.

The editor is a delight, plain and simple. It’s fast. Super fast. There’s nothing dragging it down man. Which ironically is where it loses.

You see, there’s no extendability. It’s like the Old Days of WP, where I have to edit a theme to make widgets. Oh and no apps right now.

Not to mention the drama of installing. It sucks for self hosted. This continues down to installing themes (sucks) and apps (non-existent). You have to reboot the Ghost ‘node’ after every change too. This is not tenable for most people and highlights the need for apps. Oh. Yeah. Apps are a thing that Ghost needs, stat.

Right now, they’ve added in a way to add code to your header and footer without needing to edit themes, which means I was able to put in my Google Analytics code easily.

Ghost is Ghost. WordPress is WordPress. For what I do, WP is right. For plain, simple, blogging, Ghost is good except for the Markdown aspect. I’ve got the hang on it, but it’s been nine years and I doubt it’s ever going to be ‘the thing.’ HTML wins for many reasons.

So what do I want from Ghost into WordPress? That damn editor! Seriously.

The content on the left and preview on the right is great. It live updates and I can see what things look like in the Visual editor while having full code control like the HTML editor. In addition, there’s no place to put in the tags or featured images or anything other than content. Until I click on that gear.

That is slick. And it works great on mobile too. Compared to the fade out and off center DFW editor in WP, which is pretty great, it’s awesome.

Of course I looked at the available plugins for WordPress

Gust Plugin – This looked great, but it doesn’t work on Multisite. On WP 4.2 it threw this:
```
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare get_avatar_url()
(previously declared in
/wp-includes/link-template.php:3414) in
/wp-content/plugins/gust/gust.php on line 202
```
Then there’s Splitdown – Not updated in a year and also errors:
```
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STATIC,
expecting &amp;#039;)&amp;#039; in
/wp-content/plugins/Splitdown-master/Splitdown.php
on line 19
```
Finally we get to PrettyPress – This isn’t a ‘Ghost’ plugin exactly but it makes a second ‘editor’ you can flip into. No save button there, but as an editor it’s rather nice.

At this point, I’m resigned to not having that kind of slick editor in WordPress. I do think it’s a nicer direction than ‘distraction free’ as it’s actually fewer distractions. All I see is my content and a preview.
20 May, 2015
Underscores (A Plugin We Need)
Look. I still hate Your frameworks.

I really do. They’re a decent idea with a terrible reality. The concept of ‘a plugin to build other plugins’ is nothing at all like a Parent Theme. A plugin that builds other plugins is synonymous with a theme framework or, perhaps you’ll understand this better, a starter theme.

Have you met _s?

_s (aka underscores) is a starter theme. Themes are built from it. In and of itself, it’s not a theme you’d see on WordPress.org because in and of itself, it’s useless. It’s not a parent theme, it’s not even a ready to use ‘drop this theme in and you have a site’ sort of thing. No, in fact if you installed it, it would look terrible.

Because the point is not to use it as a theme, but to use it to build your theme. No one in their right mind uses Underscores as a parent theme. No one uses it as a drop-in to their themes. It’s a, literal, framework where you say “This is my Theme Name, this is my slug.” And then it drops out the code for you to start plugging into.

What do the existing framework plugins do?

The problem isn’t what they do it’s how they do it. They’re not frameworks. They’re libraries. A library is like the AWS SDK library. It’s a vendor based addition to your code that enables it to do ‘a thing’ but, in and of itself, doesn’t do anything. A library is a great tool and lets you include code that you’re going to use but don’t want to reinvent the wheel. I love them. Another example would be that Font Awesome is a library.

But we don’t allow libraries, themselves, in the repo. That means if you write a Font Awesome plugin, it has to actually do something besides just include Font Awesome.

And the point here is that a plugin, like a theme, has to be usable. It has to stand up on it’s own and do something.

Is a library perfect?

Once you take your framework plugin out of the repo, how do you handle upgrades?

Obviously you can run your own upgrader (which we’d encourage) but if the plugin is folded into another plugin, you’re not able to just upgrade YOUR portion. So you have to wait (and trust) the plugin dev will update their plugin and include your latest version.

Mind you, this is an existing problem with plugins and libraries and, in a way, is related to why we don’t allow you to use your own copy of jquery. Conflicts! Yay!

How does _s handle updates?

This is something Konstantin’s thought about before. Funny thing, Underscores is versionless and it doesn’t update often.
Here is a list of reasons why you should not update your _s-based theme with our changes to _s:
- Most likely your theme code will have evolved to a degree where merging _s changes would lead to conflicts. They also won’t be applied to anything you created on top of it.
- We are in the unique situation to not having to worry about backwards compatibility when we commit changes. And we don’t!
- Once you release your theme, you’ve probably fixed all the things in _s that needed fixing for your case. Just because we push an update to _s, it does not necessarily mean it applies to your theme.
Basically there should be no updates to your framework.

And that terrifies a lot of people. Because the extant framework plugins update a lot. In fact, some of them want to be in the .org repository specifically because they update a lot.

They shouldn’t. And that’s why I think they’re doing it wrong.

Be a Starter Plugin

Stop trying to be a framework. They don’t work, they’re not sustainable, and they’re problematic.

Be a starter plugin. Be a plugin that I can download. Use that underscores form so I can download everything set up for ‘me’ right away, no search and replace needed. Have a template settings page that creates basic options, just like a theme. Except that plugins are not themes. And there’s the real issue. A theme is ‘easier’ (and this is subjective) because it only has one interface: The customizer.

Plugins can add a menu section, they can add an option to an existing area like discussion, they can be silent and have no information and just work. Plugins can do anything and in any way. There’s not a ‘standard’ because there really can’t be.

Is There An Answer?

I think the starter plugin would work, if it came with options. It would more likely be a workflow. Where do you want your menu? Will you connect to an API? Will you need settings?

If someone can boil that down, it would all be better.
18 May, 2015
2.2 Million AOL Dialup Users

InfoSec Taylor Swift tweeted about how a man using AOL’s dialup and AT&T got charged $24,000 for the number he dialed.

My take away?

https://twitter.com/Ipstenu/status/593236980848164864

You see, I read this line and did a double take.

Eighty-three-year-old Ron Dorff of Woodland Hills is one of the 2.2 million remaining AOL dial-up customers.

2.2 million people are still on AOL dialup.

Most of my Twitter followers took my shock the wrong way. Folks, I know that there are many reasons for this. I know that folks in the sticks don’t have other options. I know that it’s cheaper than satellite for people on a budget.

None of that was my point.

Or rather, it was but not the way people seem to think about it.

Woodland Hills is in the LA Metro area. He has other options. Still not my point.

No, my point is something Eric Mann said at WordCamp Portland 2013 that stuck with me (and my wife). My point is that if only 50% of phones in America are smart phones and that if 2.2 million people in the US use AOL dialup, that’s a lot of people.

50% of America is 159.45 million.

2.2 million people is 0.69% of America.

Interestingly, a Pew survey determined that 3% of Americans use dialup at home. That’s 9 million people.

My ‘terrifying’ moment had nothing to do with the fact that people are on AOL (though I admit I thought AOL had canned dialup). My moment was entirely because we, the creators of the internet, are making a poor experience for about 9 million people. Realistically, we’re probably making the internet suck for a lot more, with our heavy websites that do a million things and are slow.

In our push to go forward, we forget about the past, and we forget to take care of the past and degrade nicely. We can’t always support everyone, but 3.18% of Americans on the internet use IE8 (according to statcounter). If we still care about IE 8 (and yes, we do), then we should care about the 3% who use dialup, and the more who are stuck on their cell phones (check out the 7.9% of users who are on the ‘other’ OS for phones, I bet they’re the ones on non-smart phone).

It’s terrifying how, in our push forward, we forget them.

The video is 5 minutes. You can watch it.

15 May, 2015
If You Call Yourself a Developer You Should …

Sometimes people scare me. Mostly it’s people who start a conversation with some variant of “I’ve been a developer for X years and I’ve never experienced a conversation like this…”

It tends to come up when I kick someone’s code back and remark “Remove your own jQuery, delete the demo folders, and your domain name is a problem so change X to Y.”

They get upset because I’ve not spelled out, specifically, to the letter, what’s wrong and where. I’ve had those conversations with everyone from a mom-and-pop shop coder to Microsoft and it really only bothers me when people are running dev companies and ask things like “How do I find that?” or “Where is that code?”

So here are my rules of what a Developer should know:

Know Logic

You should understand logic. Not Spock Logic. Math Logic. And Computer Logic. Don’t worry. I don’t think you need to be a math rock star to write code. I think that if you understand basic algebra, which you may be surprised to know you do, then you’re okay. But you have to understand the most basic of logic gates:

Can you look at that and understand the differences? Great. Write some code. Understanding the elementary building blocks of circuits, the A or B, the Yes or No, is the crux of programing. If you can’t logic that out, you should stop and read up on it. Most self-taught programmers have intuited that, but at some point they had a class in Boolean Algebra and learned this. Maybe it wasn’t called that, but most of us had that class in at least High School. You’ll need it.

Know Grep

You need to know how to search all the files in your code. If you’re on a linux flavor, grep or ack are your best friends. So when someone says “I see you’re calling domain.com in your code, why?” you know how to find that, even if they don’t give you a line.

Know What You’ve Got

You need to know all the packages added to your code. Did you add a library or a sub-module? This is your responsibility to know what they are. That way, when someone tells you to ‘remove the X module’ you’re not surprised. If it’s in your code, you should know what it is.

Know What You Need

You need to know what those packages are adding to your site. Did you download a whole jQuery library with all the demo files and a version of jQuery and the help docs? Do you really need all that? Dollars to donuts, you don’t. Don’t let your code be cluttered by what you don’t need. It’s more work to maintain it, and if there’s a security hole in it, you still have to be aware of it. Save yourself time, effort, and a hack. Leave out what you don’t need.

Know What To Use

You need to know how to edit the various filetypes. Personally I don’t care what you use. I like Coda. My friends like Sublime. I don’t care. Just make sure you use something that works for you and helps you work better. While you can do all your programing in Notepad, I wouldn’t suggest it. You will need tools to help you keep track of the complex world you’re building. Sometimes you’ll have to use a specialized tool.

Know How Your Tools Work

Did you know Github makes a downloadable zip of your code? Did you know that zip doesn’t include submodules? Did you know Github forks aren’t searchable? You should. I have a few awesome tools, like Coda, which lets me search my repositories and find code. I use BBEdit to search zips. I use a new tool to compare folders when I don’t have version control (for whatever reason). But I know how they all work.

What Else?

What do you think is imperative for someone who calls themself a professional developer to know?

13 May, 2015
Self Ghosted
I had to restart everything.

You see, getting Node.js and apache to work together wasn’t going to fly, so I went and built a new VPS with Ubuntu over on DreamHost. Obviously not everyone has this luxury, but since I do, and since DreamHost made this as easy as clicking on a box, I thought it would be perfect.

Requirements

You have to be shell savvy for this. Sorry. There’s no other way. Just accept that and move on.

You need a VPS. The new Ubuntu SSD VPSes all have a one-click ability for Node.js which makes life easier.

You should use nginx and not apache.

Ghost requires Node.js 0.10.x (not 0.12.x). They recommend Node.js 0.10.36 & npm 2.5.0. Of course, DreamHost installs node 0.12.x and npm 2.5.x. You can check by typing node -v and npm -v to see what versions you have. Does this mean you can’t run Ghost? No, it’ll work, but it’s not what they like.

You’ll also need an ‘admin’ account on your server. From panel, click on “VPS” and then “Manage Admin Users” to add a new user to that box.

Get Node.js on your VPS

This is quite simple. First, get an Ubuntu VPS. All the new boxes on DreamHost are Ubuntu, so this is the easy part. Once you have the VPS on DreamHost, make a new domain. I made ghost.elftest.net and in the settings, I checked a box to use node.js:

That will force my file path to be ~/ghost.elftest.net/public (normally on DreamHost it’s ~/domain.com you see) but that’s not an issue since this is a new box. That path will be my ‘home’ folder for the domain and where I install everything (if someone asks you ‘where is X installed on your server?’ you tell them that path). That path also means that had I already been using that domain, it would mess up my folders and paths. If you’re doing this on an existing domain, keep that in mind.

Install Ghost

Like I said before, you have to install on your server, not your desktop. Every single doc I read told me I HAD to do this as the server admin, someone with sudo access. I really, really, really did not like that. I mean, epic levels of hate for the idea that I couldn’t have my user account own things, and have the code in my darn web folder.

Me being me, I hatched a plan. I was just going to do it. I was just going to install it in my webfolder and see how it goes. I came up with this theory because when I read How To Install Ghost on DreamHost I noticed it wanted me to have a specific user chown the folders. Not the admin user, but a special ghost user. So what if I just made ‘elftestghost’ the ghost user, and what if I just used ~/ghost.elftest.net/public/ghost/ as my install directory instead of /var/www/ghost/? And this way, I’d be able to pop in and edit things as my normal user.

So here’s what I did.
```
$ curl  -L https://ghost.org/zip/ghost-latest.zip -o ghost.zip
$ unzip -uo ghost.zip -d ghost
$ cd ghost/
$ npm install --production
```
That’s it. Ghost is installed. I expected that last step to fail and I’m still a little surprised it didn’t. If it does fail for you, run it as your admin account with sudo, and then chown it over to your ‘owner.’

Configure Ghost

Now that Ghost is installed, you may wonder where it is. We haven’t finished the install yet as it happens. We need to configure it and to do that, we copy the file config.example.js to config.js and open it up.

Once you look at it you see that there are multiple ‘config’ options. Since we called --production in our start command, logically we’re going to edit that section. And lo, there’s the bad URL:
```
config = {
    // ### Production
    // When running Ghost in the wild, use the production environment
    // Configure your URL and mail settings here
    production: {
        url: 'http://my-ghost-blog.com',
        mail: {},
```
Change that to the right URL. Mine is http://ghost.elftest.net

Also look for this:
```
        server: {
            // Host to be passed to node's `net.Server#listen()`
            host: '127.0.0.1',
            // Port to be passed to node's `net.Server#listen()`, for iisnode set this to `process.env.PORT`
            port: '2368'
        }
```
Change the host to 0.0.0.0 and save the file. You can also set it to the IP of your server, but as that might change, it’s not required.

Finally you’ll want to set up mail which can be complex. I set up a special account on my own server.

Setup Ghost

Seriously this is not a five minute install. Your site starts with a Hello World type post which tells you all about the glory of Markdown. If you go to your admin page (http://ghost.elftest.net/ghost/) it sends you to http://ghost.elftest.net/ghost/setup/ where you get this:

This actually makes more sense than it did on the Ghost Pro site, where I was wondering why I had to make a user and then a user. Here I’m clearly making a user for the site. There I was making a user for their network (Ghost Pro) and then one for my site.

Setup Nginx Proxy

Will it never end? The reason we want to do this, and this is why we’re on nginx and not apache, is in order to have a pretty URL without the port number.

Log in to your server as your ‘normal’ account (the one who owns the domain, not the admin) and make an nginx folder for config:
```
cd ~
mkdir -p nginx/ghost.elftest.net
```
Then make a file called ghost.conf with the following:
```
location / {
    proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header   Host      $http_host;
    proxy_pass         http://localhost:2368;
}
```
Restart nginx (which yes, you need the sudo power for so yes, you need an admin account) and it’ll magically work. If you get a “502 Bad Gateway” error, it’s because Ghost isn’t running. Speaking of…

Make Ghost Always Start

Okay so I actually do need my admin account. I went with the init script approach to keeping the Ghost always on.
```
$ sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TryGhost/Ghost-Config/master/init.d/ghost \
  -o /etc/init.d/ghost-elftest
```
Then I edited the ghost-elftest file:
```
GHOST_ROOT=/var/www/ghost
GHOST_GROUP=ghost
GHOST_USER=ghost
```
I changed that to where ghost was really installed, but it brings up an interesting thought. What if I wanted multiple ghost instances? Well that’s actually why I named the file ‘ghost-elftest’ instead of ‘ghost’ (which they recommend). With this setup, I can name an init file for each instance and run the commands as sudo ghost-elftest start and so on. Keep in mind, you also have to pick a custom port for each instance.

There are three final commands to run in order to force Ghost to start up on reboot:
```
$ sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/ghost-elftest
$ sudo update-rc.d ghost-elftest defaults
$ sudo update-rc.d ghost-elftest enable
```
Now I can use Ghost to my heart’s content.

Conclusion?

A WordPress killer this is not. It’s just not. If they can make it run without the need for admin/root/sudo access, it has a chance. Once it’s set up, it’s quite nice, but the 5 minute install this is not, and it’s going to need that to beat the beast.
11 May, 2015
Mailbag: Ghost Image Errors
Once I got Ghost up and running, I got some errors and there was venting around the usual places. Image uploads were failing. I cried. Then I solved it. Then someone asked a logical question.

How did you fix the image upload issue?

What happened was that I found I was getting a Wiggly Cat whenever I uploaded an image. Eventually the upload failed.

The cat bounced up and down. My wife eyed it and said “That’s not much of a chuffing SOS now, is it?” (no, she’s not British, but what else can you say about that?). Thankfully, after years of WordPress support I went right into the file system and checked if the images were being uploaded at all. Answer? Sort of.
```
$ ls -lah
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 elfghost elfgroup 131 Apr 15 17:22 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 elfghost elfgroup  23 Apr 15 17:12 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 elfghost elfgroup   0 Apr 15 17:13 f4c134eb021e026414a1bd23d3c5c927-1.jpeg
-rw-r--r-- 1 elfghost elfgroup   0 Apr 15 17:12 f4c134eb021e026414a1bd23d3c5c927.jpeg
-rw-r--r-- 1 elfghost elfgroup   0 Apr 15 17:22 unicorn.jpeg
```
0 bytes isn’t right. But again, WordPress support history to the rescue. I checked my /tmp folder, saw it was full, turfed the entire thing, and the upload worked. Rather fast, too, since it’s not making an image resizes. I will note, had that fix failed, I’d have started playing with folder permissions, but since I got the 0-byte version, I was reasonably sure that wasn’t my issue.

Two humor tidbits for you.

Bing thinks I write in Turkish:

Here’s a cute bouncing cat:

Pusheen The Cat
8 May, 2015