Over the past year I’ve fallen in love with Ghost and the ease it provides for building apps with it. Between it’s content API and Admin API you can do everything from building a new front end website to a full featured backend to write to it’s data storage.
Introducing GhostWhisper for Ghost
GhostWhisper covers two main areas I wish the main editor did a better job at: quick posting and live blogging. In a lot of ways, I wanted to recreate my own personal Twitter.
GhostWhisper lets me quickly publish notes and small posts to the asides section of my site, while all of the normal settings automatically getting set, from tags, to the title. The app also provides basic markdown buttons to easily format text from the phone.
Another feature I wish more blogging platforms offered was the feature to liveblog. So I added it in too. Live blogging simply requires you to create a base post, and load it in the live section. From there, every time you post, it appends the original post with post time and additional formatting. There’s no need to edit the original or worry about content getting messed up.
The technical stuff
GhostWhisper was built with React and NextJS. It uses Showdown for converting and previewing Markdown, and uses the Ghost Admin API and Ghosts’s admin tokens to authenticate to the CMS. Tokens are stored in localStorage.
Is this particular setup secure? Not really. While other domains can’t read the locaStorage, anyone with access to your phone or computer can easily grab the information. The correct approach would use the actual authentication Ghost provides and I’m aware of this. But this is meant as a quick and simple tool that fill a very niche space most users simply don’t need.
