I have known about Ghost since its KickStarter campaign. And recently they just launched the hosted platform for Ghost. I like to set up and run it myself, but the hosted platform is 100% customized to run Ghost blogs. So it could be more efficient and reliable than tinkering on my own. While I was testing it, I have noticed two small Markdown features supported by Ghost:

Automatic links

You do not need to enclose the fully qualified URL in angular brackets, URL like http://ghost.org will be automatically linked up. But this works well without language like English where a space denotes as a separator. When I work with language like Chinese, this frequently creating a problem where the Chinese characters are treated as parts of the link. Therefore, I still prefer to write it with angular brackets and get into the habit in doing:

<http://ghost.org/>

Line divider

One feature I like so far is the support of a line divider. Just need three dashes in a line, it will be converted into a fancy divider. This is great for writing references and footnotes.

This is a quick blog for getting started with Ghost.

Exploration continues…

If I use GitHub to host my blog, and write the content in Markdown, then we not use GitHub Flavored Markdown. There are a few difference that are most relevant to me.

Fenced code blocks with syntax highlighting instead of four spaces:

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(function(){
  // Do something
}());

instead of four spaces:

(function(){
  // Do something
}());

Which is essentially the same, but GitHub flavored is better, since sometimes I write code block in Google Docs, and the syntax highlighting.

And don’t forget that emoji emoticons are supported. :smile: :smiley: :laughing: