Creating a Ghost Blog on Azure Websites

I have been running a blog at GeeksWithBlogs (GWB) for more than 7 years and so far it has been great. It's been months since I thought of moving into a new blog but didn't get the chance to work on it because of the busy stuff that's going on in my life and work. Whereas GWB offers some features for managing your blog, it also has downsides such as the built-in editor, limited themes and most especially the lack of “responsiveness”. These reasons are the main factors that urged me to push my plan on moving to a brand new blog. Fortunately, I manage to make some time on making this into a reality.

This article will walk you through the step-by-step process on how to create a blog on Azure websites.

Ghost

Ghost is an Open-source application that allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do. It's simple, elegant and designed so that you can spend less time making your blog work and more time blogging.

Why Ghost

Why Ghost? Simply because I only need a blogging platform that is simple, neat and powerful. Adding to that, Ghost uses something called Markdown for writing. Essentially, it's a shorthand way to manage your post formatting as you write.

Prerequisites

Before proceeding further ensure that you already have an Azure account. If you haven't registered yet then just head over to this link.

Now down to the road

As you may know there are many possible ways to install a blog in Azure. You could either install it from the Azure website's gallery or by doing a custom install. Installing it via gallery is the simplest and it is good for bloggers who will just post anything on the web without doing some customization on the blog itself. The custom installation is intended for developers who want to explore code and customize the project based on your needs. Another way is to install it via Deploy to Azure quick install. In this article I'm going to show how we're going to use the “deploy to Azure” installation.

Now head over to the official GitHub repository for Ghost to Azure. At the “read me” section you should be able to see this:


Figure 1: Ghost 0.6.4

Click on the “Deploy to Azure” button to begin installing Ghost. It should take you to the following form below:


Figure 2: Start installing Ghost

Supply the necessary fields and be sure to verify each field before moving to the next step. Once you are sure about the information you entered then click Next. On the next window click Deploy. You should be able to see the following screen while the deployment process is going on:


Figure 3: Deploy to Azure Setup

And here's a screenshot of the completed process:


Figure 4: Deploy to Azure

Now you can start managing your site or visiting it by clicking on the generated URL above. Here's the sample page of the site:


Figure 5: Ghost

That's pretty easy! You now have an awesome blog and it's live!

What's next?

Obviously the next thing is to register a Ghost account to start publishing. To do this just head over to http://<yourblogsitename>.azurewebsites.net/Admin. You should be able to see the following form:


Figure 6: Welcome to your new ghost blog

Supply the necessary fields and then hit the “OK, LET'S DO THIS” button. Once done then you can start writing your post and spread it to the world:


Figure 7: Welcome to ghost

To learn more about Ghost visit.

Managing your site

There are two ways to manage your site.


Figure 8: Your web app has been created


Figure 9: Managing your site

That's it! I hope you'll find this article useful.