In my 30-something years as an engineer and product manager, I have never seen a better example of putting style over substance than ghost, the so-called blogging engine.

Yes, it looks clean and pretty. Yes it’s quick to write a post.

If your goal is to write, it’s all good.

But if you goal is to be read, you’re hosed, because Ghost has no way for readers to find relevant info on your blog such as “all post regarding heroku”.

No search. Still. And the Github thread discussing adding it is a joke. Let me summarize: “we can’t add ANY search until we find a way to incorporate a fancy query language, have a single-source solution that works for the (3 or 4) databases we support, that works well on Gigabytes of data.”

No Tag List. First, here’s what they say about their tag feature:

Ghost tags are intended to be a super-feature - a powerhouse of customisability for your blog. Tags are a single flexible and powerful concept of a taxonomy which should provide all the features a blog could need to categorise and list posts in interesting ways. (https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/wiki/Tags-101)

So, tags are important, useful, so you can tag a post. And if you happen to know a tag you can see all the posts with that tag via exampleblog.com/tag/heroku but… and yes, I know this seems far too stupid to believe… they did not add a url to list the tags.

In summary, the Ghost team seems to be so busy drinking the “easy to write” Kool-aid that they seem to have completely ignored the reader… your blog readers cannot search for a post… not by a simple keyword like “heroku” nor from a list of available tags.

Product mis-management like that used to be a shooting offense in silicon valley.

(My blog is now using Wordpress.)