Ghostify & Roon shutting down.

Looks like two services that I've been looking at are closing. Ghostify and Roon. Both are markdown based minimalist just blogging solutions. Ghostify was a third-party Ghost host, while Roon was totally independent and pretty nice (even has an accompanying iOS). Both will be gone by 2015. 

However, that's not really the end of the story for Roon, as it was acquired by the Ghost Foundation, makers of the open source Ghost blogging API and Ghost Pro, the premium (official) hosted service. Hopefully, the innovations of Roon will be included in the next release of Ghost, and the new team members will help speed up the version 1.0 release. 

While I've enjoyed playing with Ghost, it just isn't complete enough. So it looks like Posthaven will be my go-to personal (random) blog for now. 

I just wish that they'd release an iOS app, too. The Safari browser post edit interface just isn't that great, though it is functional. 

Posthaven, vs...

So I’m using Posthaven right now because I contacted them about trial accounts and migrating my information from TypePad, and they said that they didn’t have either. After a short discussion, they enabled this account for me to test. I won’t be able to bring my content from TypePad automagically, but I guess I could manually transfer the most important stuff. I don’t know that it’s worth it normally, but the fact that Posthaven has this “online forever” feature for accounts after a year of service... 

Overall, I’m fairly disappointed that the service doesn’t have markdown support, as it’s my favorite writing environment. The rich text editor is okay, but it feels limiting in some ways, mostly because it doesn’t allow a thought process as free flowing. I think that that’s the best way to describe it, even if paradoxical. Rich text has more options, but it doesn’t feel like more. If I want to add emphasis to a word or embolden it, I can’t simply type my way to it—I need to pause, adjust the cursor, tap/click and keep going. 

Brett (of Posthaven) mentioned that import is a feature that they intend to add along with markdown support, but that the list of things that they want to include is long and they aren’t sure when they’ll be able to get to it.