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.

Exclusive: 10 Graphic Deals – only $47!

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

Meet Paul. He is a History major and a current Undergraduate Research Award (URA) scholar. His research focuses on Russian Civil War propaganda posters and their effects on Cold-War and post-Cold War history.

How did you find your mentor for year research project?
I had a class with Dr. Kate Brown. 

How did you know this was the project you wanted to do?
I have been interested in the Soviet Union since I was six. For a very long time, I have wanted to do in-depth research on the Russian Civil War.

Is this your first independent research project?
I have completed two other pieces of research on my other interest, which is China’s rise. I have already written a 75-page paper on the People’s Liberation Army-Navy, and a paper on the Sino-Australian relationship.

Do you get course credit for this work? How much time do you put into it?
This URA also doubles as a History honors thesis. During the summer I lived in DC, and I went to the Library of Congress on a weekly basis. I also am reading books for my research for a significant portion of my day.

How did you hear about the Undergraduate Research Award (URA) program?
Through the Sondheim Scholars program.

What academic background did you have before you applied for the URA?
I have taken a few years of Russian and I have taken most of the Russian history courses offered at UMBC.

Was the application difficult to do?
It was moderately hard. Coming up with a research question that is doable in one year is very challenging. My mentor was very helpful in the process of writing the proposal.

What has been the hardest part about your research? What was the most unexpected thing?
The hardest part was finding materials that deal with this issue. The most unexpected was finding out how many religious symbols that the supposedly atheist Communist Party used in its propaganda.

What else are you involved in on campus?
Debate Team, Model UN Team, History Student Council, Jewish Student Union and trying to manage two other majors, one minor, and two certificate programs.

What is your advice to other students about getting involved in research?
Finding a good mentor is critical. If you want to get a good mentor, stand out in a class that the mentor teaches and take it from there. Additionally, it would help if your mentor is your major adviser. 

Read his abstract here...

Dr. Evelyn Erenrich from Rutgers University will talk on “An Inside Look at Graduate School and Summer Research: How to Prepare, Get Accepted, and Succeed” at Noon on Wednesday, October 16 in room 208, Public Policy.

In addition to discussing strategies for research success, Dr. Erenrich will spotlight exciting programs and interdisciplinary training opportunities at Rutgers University, including a summer program, RiSE (Research in Science and Engineering), which has included many UMBC students. Mr. Immanuel Williams, a UMBC alumnus who is currently a doctoral Fellow at Rutgers, will be joining me to give his personal perspective. Students can also sign up for individual appointments by contacting Ms. Alicia Hall, Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address.

"It's a piece of advice yogis have given for thousands of years: take a deep breath and relax. Watch the tension melt from your muscles and all your niggling worries vanish. Somehow we all know that relaxation is good for us.

Now the hard science has caught up: a comprehensive scientific study showing that deep relaxation changes our bodies on a genetic level has just been published. What researchers at Harvard Medical School discovered is that, in long-term practitioners of relaxation methods such as yoga and meditation, far more ''disease-fighting genes'' were active, compared to those who practised no form of relaxation.

In particular, they found genes that protect from disorders such as pain, infertility, high blood pressure and even rheumatoid arthritis were switched on. The changes, say the researchers, were induced by what they call ''the relaxation effect'', a phenomenon that could be just as powerful as any medical drug but without the side effects. ''We found a range of disease-fighting genes were active in the relaxation practitioners that were not active in the control group,'' Dr Herbert Benson, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who led the research, says. The good news for the control group with the less-healthy genes is that the research didn't stop there."

Read more...

Her students loved her.

She taught French at a pricey Catholic university for 25 years until her unfortunate death…

At her funeral, the beloved professor was so poor that she was

“laid out in a simple, cardboard casket devoid of any handles for pallbearers.”

How could this be?

Well,  Madame Margaret Mary Vojtko was not a full-time professor at Duquesne University. She was an adjunct, a part time professor, which meant that she was paid little, received no benefits, and could be laid off at any time.

A combination of these things decided her fate.

Mary taught three courses a semester and two during the summer. No easy task. Not easy money.

She was making under $25,000 a year with no health benefits. Like so many low paid Americans, she struggled until…

She received her cancer diagnosis last year.

Now it became harder for Mary to pay her bills. To make matters worse, the university cut her down to one course a semester, reducing her income to a flimsy $10,000 a year. Her students loved her, but the university cited that she was no longer effective in the classroom. Then, this spring, they laid her off.

The devastation that followed – Mary’s fall into absolute poverty, her struggle to remain self-sufficient, and her eventual death on September 1 – has sparked national conversation.

Her image has become the symbol for a movement to improve the conditions of part-time professors, a group that CNN writer Gary Rhoades refers to as “the new working poor.”

#IAmMaryMargaret is the movement’s hash-tag on Twitter. In cities like Seattle, Boston, and Washington, part-time professors are mobilizing to earn better pay and benefits.

Madame Mary Margaret would be proud of all the cries of  Liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Vive la adjuncts!