Dashboard was a technically unviable photoshop mockup that was very easy to kill. We had to choose between shipping on time, and making a fancy dashboard. We chose shipping.

Some people are still upset about it today.

Those people will never ship.

I remember backing the ghost Kickstarter and being extremely excited about its potential and possibility but the initial version really did disappointment. I don’t think it was just the dashboard for me, but it felt not as blog focused or friendly as the Kickstarter had made out. I kept track of ghost, intending to use it, but it seemed to shift to be more for businesses and not blogging focused like the original vision (and ironically the exact critique it leveled at WordPress). Despite having a year of ghost pro hosting from my backer level I never redeemed it and now it seems impossible to do so. Funnily enough, just last month I spun up a digital ocean server to give ghost a go after seeing the 3.0 version and being impressed.

I always try to give makers the benefit of the doubt, you never know the real reasons behind what they are doing or the data they have in their hands that we don’t. At the same time, sometimes people just made bad choices.

Regardless of the dashboard and merits of shipping, it’s not a great sign for the head of a company who makes a blogging platform to choose to write a tweet thread rather than a blog post. He could, of course, do both.