What’s better: Posthaven or Ghost?

For the money, between the two, I don’t think it’s much of a question. If you’re going with a hosted service, for $5/month you can either get Ghost 0.4 or Posthaven. Although there are distinct positives and negatives with each service, for most people, I think Posthaven is the superior choice. 

Reasons you’d want Ghost instead: 

• You are an elite javascript hacker
• You need to have a custom theme
• You must have Markdown
• You’re looking for a short-term website
• You’re willing to pay for 0.4 while waiting for Ghost 1.0 

I really would like Markdown with Posthaven and would like to post from an external editor (other than email). Those features should be coming. Posthaven should soon have custom themes, so if you’re like me and you aren’t fond of the white/blue/black color palette (it reminds me of Delicious), you wouldn’t have to deal with it for long. 

It seems like the guys are really putting in a lot of effort to improve the service. 

Perhaps the best thing is permanent URLs. 

Link rot sucks. It seems like it’s inevitable on the web. People like to act like everything on the internet stays on the internet, but that’s not always the case. A lot is archived, but it often isn’t easy to find. Posthaven has promised to keep any site paid for at least one year online forever. If you stop paying, you won’t be able to add content — but it’ll be there. 

That’s really attractive, especially if you’d like your blog to outlive you. Obviously there’s a risk; Posthaven is run by two people, and if something happened to them, well... who knows what will happen to the content. I’ll try to get an answer on that. 

Mobile Blogging, iOS blogging — actually works. 

Part of the original Kickstarter pitch for Ghost is that it’s a beautiful, simple platform that would work on all devices. Many screenshots show the backend on an iPad and iPhone. In practice, the UI is terrible. It’s unreliable to slow. 

Posthaven actually works really well on iOS devices. I was pleasantly surprised to see the rich text features fully functional. I would still prefer Markdown, but it’s nice to use a service that works. The split-screen design of Ghost isn’t great in general. Text replacement, “Substitutions” on Mac, don’t work properly in the javascript enhanced, Mou-inspired Ghost post editor. 

Even if it did work, I still don’t like the side-by-side panels. It’s distracting; I don’t like the main text off to the side, I want it centered, nice and big. Medium actually does a pretty good job, but their autosave feature breaks focus because the ‘M’ logo keeps shifting back and forth. 

I’d really, really like to keep Posthaven. 

I’d like to point my eponymous domain here and blog away. Alas. 

Maybe someday. I really believe that Posthaven will just get better and better. 

When I first started using Posthaven, one of the features I wanted was multiple contributors. I’ve been planning a political/opinion site; the idea is to write about different issues from various perspectives of multiple people. Ghost can’t do this yet.