istoselidagr: 5 Incredibly Simple Tutorials for Customising Your Ghost Blog

One of the best things about Ghost is that it can be customised completely to suit your personality, your style, or even your mood with Ghost Themes.

We read a lot of posts on the Ghost Forums, and we get a lot of emails with questions, so over the last few months we've started to get an idea of the things which people want to do with their Ghost themes the most.
Today, we've put together a list of the top 5 tutorials out there that cover the things you've been asking about most: How do I add Google Analytics to my blog? How do I add comments? And what is this HandleBars stuff, anyway? All of these articles have been put together the incredible Ghost community, and it's our pleasure to share them with you.

1. How To: Get Started with Ghost Themes

This month's Net Magazine contains a wonderful introduction to building your very first Ghost theme. It's incidentally also the first time Ghost has been on the cover of a printed magazine, so we're pretty proud.
Net Mag have also been kind enough to nominate us for Open Source Project and Game Changer of the year!

2. How To: Add Google Analytics to Ghost

Tracking visits to your blog is something that pretty much everyone wants to do. It lets you know how far and wide your writing is spreading, and gives you an idea for what type of content to focus more on in the future! Gilbert Pellegrom has put together this great 2-step tutorial for adding Google Analytics to your Ghost blog quickly and easily.

3. How To: Add Comments to Ghost

Ghost doesn't come with comments by default, but that doesn't mean you can't have them! Much like adding Google Analytics, it's a straightforward case of editing your theme. There are quite a few different options, but the most popular are Disqus, LiveFyre, Facebook and Google+. Luckily, Kris Hoja has put together a comprehensive tutorial for how to integrate all of them!
Note: If you use our hosted platform, you can skip the intro about SSH and Filezilla. Just zip up your edited theme and upload it via ghost.org as normal!

4. How To: Back up Your Ghost Blog

All About Ghost have a very short, very useful post on how to back up any Ghost blog with a few clicks. On our hosted platform this is done for you automatically in the background, but you can always take a manual backup or export of your content too if you feel like it.

5. How To: Build a Complete Ghost Theme from Start to Finish

Over on WebDesignTuts, Kezz Bracey has been putting together a multi-part full guide on creating a full Ghost theme. It starts basic, and then guides you all the way through to the more advanced features which you can make use of. If you're looking to get to grips with building complete themes for Ghost, this is a fantastic place to get started!