In this recent post to his site Samuel Stenton shows you how to get Ghost (a recent player in the blogging space) and Node.js installed on a Laravel Forge server. The Laravel Forge service makes it quick and easy to create and launch virtual machines on the cloud service of your choosing.

He's broken it down into five steps (not including signing up for Forge if you haven't already):

• Step 1: Install Node.js
• Step 2: Download and Configure Ghost
• Step 3: Install and Run
• Step 3: Configure NGINX to Serve our Ghost Blog Correctly
• Step 5: Not finished quite yet!

That final step includes the instructions to restart the needed software when/if the server happens to be rebooted.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Bruno Skvorc has written up the first part of his look at installing Ghost with Nginx and Phalcon on his hosting provider. This is the first post in his "showdown" series of trials on various CMS systems.

You might be wondering why I’m writing about Ghost on a PHP oriented channel – this series will be a showdown of all the various PHP based CMS’ I can find, benchmarked against each other and against Ghost, as I look for the next best alternative. Since my DigitalOcean droplet already runs Nginx as a reverse proxy for the blog, I’ll also be deploying all the CMS’ on that same installation, each on its own subdomain.

He walks you through the whole process from start to finish:

• Installing PHP on Nginx
• Setting up a virtual host on a subdomain
• Installing Phalcon

The WordPress platform has become one of the de-facto standards when it comes to blogging and content management sites. In this new post, though, SitePoint wonders if a new competitor in the market is enough to unseat WordPress from its high ranking - Ghost.

When someone mentions the term blogging platform your mind likely brings up thoughts of WordPress, or maybe Blogger.com. It did, didn’t it? While those two platforms have clearly carved out a respectable slice of the world’s blogging population, there remains a void left unfilled. This gap in platforms was largely created by the incredible popularity and growth of the blogging world itself. [...] This new entrant goes by the stealthy moniker Ghost. A fitting name really, given it’s unapologetic focus on no­frills web publishing.

They go through this new tool, spotlighting some of the features it offers and the extensibility it offers (complete with screenshots). While Ghost is a Node application (unlike its PHP counterpart) it's still relatively easy to get up and running. They do admit, however, that the title of the article is a bit inflammatory. Ghost and WordPress have different target audiences and widely different feature sets, but in the blogging realm, Ghost provides an interesting alternative.