ghost notes

The editor in ghost is really limiting. The ghost blog editor is a clean no distractions editor that makes you focus on writing. That's it. It's really good at doing it's job of keeping you spitting out words. It has a real-time markdown interpreter so you know how your post looks like if you accidentally insert a random symbol. It also has support for images and other embeds but they are all things you insert after you have written your blog post. And this is nice, you write your article and then insert everything else after. A streamlined approach to writing.

However one thing that ghost is weak at is handling data and posts already in your blog. There are three main features I think the platform is lacking.

Versioning system

While a previous version may be completely useless to the audience, in writing, the writers and the editors should be able to see changes that may cause a difference on the content of the article and it's possible perception. A small mistake such as someone erasing the whole article and then losing power before they were able to undo the damage should be something easily recoverable from.

File duplicates

To reuse something that is already in the site, you have to get its location, get the html embed code for it if it's not an image and embed an html block into your new page containing that. That is if the file you want to use is even published in your site. If you've stopped using the file or lost its link, you'd have to dig through all the files through the terminal and write the link and the markup code yourself. Here in PM studios, we just end up re-uploading the same image whenever we use it. Leading to more storage usage that limits our server usage and just having a lot of different links essentially containing the same file. I wish they could add an asset browser even if it's just for the images.  

Internal links

Almost the same issue with the file duplicates but linking to other pages or articles. I realize that yes, we shouldn't change links and URLs of our posts, however, it would still be coll if we had an internal paging system where we could easily refer to a page or a part of a page that we want to reference without having to open up the browser, look for the page, get the link, and make a link.

Solution(?)

This is why I was looking at alternatives such as note taking apps and wikis. These options solve the connectivity issue between the pages, they usually have an internal page system that lets you just say a page name and converts that automatically to a link of the desired page. These solutions also almost always offer versioning systems builtin to them as they are for knowledge storing. And file duplicates and managements can only really be solved by a combination of easy internal linking and a content management system on the site so you still have to look for a solution that supports that.

The only shortcoming they have in our current space is that they are not made to publish articles. Sure, note taking apps have an export and share option, wikis have an inherent design to be shared. They don't have the same format as a blog and would require a lot of work on customizing themes and layouts(maybe a worthy endeavor idk) which would inevitably cut down on their features. For now we just have to manage our files manually and make sure to not insert or erase random words in our posts.

Let's go!