Following months of anticipation the first public release of the Ghost blogging platform is finally live.

Released three weeks ago to the 6000 smart Kickstarters who backed the project, Ghost 0.3.2 is now available to everyone.

For anyone not following the saga, Ghost was first dreamt up a year ago by John O’Nolan, a WordPress specialist based in Austria. He then published a post, or perhaps a manifesto, as to what Ghost could and should be.

The aim of the project was to create a blogging platform that’s just for blogging. Inspired by the bloating of WordPress, Ghost was designed to cut out all the extras and get us back to the essence of blogging: writing great content.

The longer I work with WordPress…the more problems I have with it…What started out as a humble blogging platform targeted at enabling digital publishing for the masses, has evolved into a fully-fledged website CMS. — John O’Nolan

Ghost is a focussed response, geared entirely towards great content. It’s just about blogging.

Ghost is innovative in several key areas: firstly, it’s fully responsive, which means every part of it will work on your phone, desktop, tablet, and soon your watch (if tech rumors are to be believed). Secondly, the navigation of content is structured around your content, not around arbitrary dates. Thirdly, the beautifully designed dashboard presents information about your content, not a bewildering array of stats about every plugin you have installed. Finally, Ghost allows you to write content in markdown, by far the fastest way to produce content for the web.

Essentially, Ghost is also open source and fully configurable. Theming is possible, and plugins can be added, ensuring that you are able to make it your own.

Head over to Ghost.org right now to sign up. Initially, you’ll have to download the source code and host it yourself. However in the coming weeks you’ll be able to host with Ghost — even using your own domain name — and that’s the preferred option because it helps the platform to grow.

If you can’t wait to get started then you’ll still need to register in order to download Ghost’s source code. It’s built with JavaScript using Node.js, so you’ll need a server that will allow you to install it (which probably mean VPS), full instructions are provided here. Happily there are also several auto-install options from Bitnami, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, and more are bound to follow.

Ghost looks like being the next big thing in blogging, whether you’re interested in theming it, extending it, or just using it, now’s the time to get onboard.

Are you planning to use Ghost? Is WordPress still viable as a blogging platform? Let us know in the comments.

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Reader Marcin A wrote in with this question about a simple unordered list in which they wanted the elements to be arranged in vertical order (top to bottom) instead of horizontal (left to right).

So markup like:

<ul>
      <li>1</li>
      <li>2</li>
      <li>3</li>
      <li>4</li>
      <li>5</li>
      <li>6</li>
    </ul>

Which would end up like:

1 4
2 5
3 6

Well Marcin, unfortunately there is no float: down; that you might want here. There are a number of ways, but as you might suspect, there are caveats with all of them.

Absolute positioning

If you know you want the layout exactly like that text diagram and you know the exact width and height of each element, you can absolutely position them in that layout easier. That's a lot of ifs, but it might be the case if it's primarily a set of images.

See the Pen gasif by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen

Noah Blon has an automated Sass-based version to make it easier for an arbitrary number of list items.

See the Pen Vertically oriented list in 2 columns - IE9+ by Noah Blon (@noahblon) on CodePen

Flexbox Columns

Flexbox was made for this kind of thing. You can have the unordered list be a flex container with a column direction, and allow wrapping. Essentially:

ul {
      display: flex;
      flex-direction: column;
      flex-wrap: wrap;
    }

In order to match the layout exactly, I'm going to apply a width and height to the flex container. If you don't have a width, each column will be as wide as it needs to be so that they fill the container. If you don't have a height, the items won't wrap.

See the Pen yHoeI by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen

Reminder you'll want to mix syntaxes here for the best support.

The advantage here is that the items can be of any size and the behavior will hold. The disadvantage is IE 10+ only.

Text Columns

Another possibility here is making the items inline-block and using CSS3 text columns. Essentially:

ul {
      column-count: 2;
      column-gap: 0;
    }
    li {
      display: inline-block;
    }

Each block will behave just like regular text, it will fill the column vertically before moving over to the next.

See the Pen oFyEH by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen

Text columns are evenly split across the width of the container, so if you want to be very specific about those column widths you'll have to be specific about the width of the container.

A difference between this and flexbox is that it will try and split the elements across the columns equally the best it can. So you don't need to declare a height if you don't want to. Essentially it tries to make it as short as possible.

Bring your own prefixes, and also IE 10+ again.

Got another way?

Let's hear it! CSS is fun. Maybe grid layout in the future?

Arranging Elements from Top to Bottom instead of Left to Right (float: down?) is a post from CSS-Tricks