[Ghost]

Another great update from the Ghost team, this time with some lovely animation to illustrate the fediverse reading experience.

The second topic of the post gave me a little bit of pause, because, whoa Nelly, I've been there:

"In light of that, we opted to go for (essentially) no database design at all. Right now, Ghost's ActivityPub service uses MySQL mostly as a key/value store, with no formalized structure of any kind. If that made no sense to you: We're essentially blindly copy-and-pasting blog posts into Excel spreadsheets."

This is how I essentially structured the Known back-end database, using a structure that had originally been pioneered at (genuinely) FriendFeed back in the day. It's sort of a fun way to mimic a NoSQL database inside of MySQL when you don't know what the ultimate structure of the data is going to be and you don't want to create database tables on the fly. But does it scale? I mean, no, not really.

So it's good to hear that the team was just using the NoSQL fakery for a test, and is now using the data they gathered to build something more structured and efficient. It sounds like the experience is optimized for Ghost Pro, which makes sense; I wonder if non-Ghost-publishers will be able to use it in some way.

As always, the full update is worth checking out - both for the content itself, and for the example of how to develop in public in an engaging way. It's great work.

#Fediverse

[Link]