Ghost is a new open source blogging platform that is much more light weight (and prettier if you ask me) than the more popular Wordpress. Its so new that it doesn't have as many plugins as Wordpress (so it goes). This very blog is a self-hosted Ghost blog!

Introduction

Out of the box, Ghost comes with a very minimal and attractive default theme called Casper (cute, huh). It features a light sans-serif font and plenty of whitespace for optimal readability. It worked just fine for us for a while until we decided we needed two things: customization and COMMENTS.

While you can find several free themes just by googling 'free ghost themes', after much debate we decided to go with a theme called Mochi that we found on Themeforest. It has the clean minimal look that we like from the default Ghost theme but it allows for more personalization and includes post comments provided by Disqus.

Installing the new theme

1. Assuming that you already have your Ghost blog up and running, you will first need to upload all theme files to it's /content/themes directory.

2. Next, you need to restart Ghost.
   
   Depending on how you installed Ghost, instructions for this step may vary. We used Digital Ocean's one-click installation. We recommend it! The next few steps require it. Otherwise skip to step 5.

3. If you are on a Mac (sorry Windows folks!) open up a Terminal and type ssh [email protected] (replace with your username and hostname). It will ask you for your password so enter that next.

4. Then, all you have to do is run service ghost restart

5. Once you have restarted Ghost, you can login to your blog admin and choose the new theme that you installed by going to Settings > General and selecting it from the theme dropdown.

6. Click 'Save'. That's it!

Did you find this article helpful? What theme are you using for your Ghost blog? Let us know in the comments below!