The previous incarnation of my blog ran Wordpress on a LAMP (Linux/Apache/Mysql/PHP) stack. There was nothing inherently wrong with that; in fact, Wordpress is battle-tested and proven, and powers some 19% of the web. It is a mature product, and has amazing community support.
I left that platform because I wanted to toy with a new stack. Node.js has been the rage in recent years, and I've had little opportunity to tinker with it. I figured rebuilding my blog on that platform could prove to be a valuable experience.
I also needed something simpler. See, Wordpress is very powerful; it allows for tons of customizations, and has seemingly infinite amount of plugins. I wasted a lot of time in the past trying plugins, updating themes, and customizing stuff in general. Ghost on the other hand is simple, and is primarily geared towards blogging, and is not a CMS. I feel I will focus more on posting with this platform, and less on customizing. We'll see.
Fun fact: the release of Ghost at the time of this writing (ver 0.7.1) is not compatible with Node 4.2.1, the current stable release X(. It took some digging to get it to work. I found the trick on their git issue tracker. Getting Ghost to work is simple enough however: we just need to update engines to support 4.2.1 and the sqlite3 dependency to version 3.1.0. User cwonrails posted a nifty asciinema on the installation process that covers this issue.