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Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

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Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#41

Post by fakeinc »

new_here wrote: post #24
sandGorgon wrote: post #21

three things: 1. its hard to search for you guys. your name is hard to SEO on. for example "medium kafka" gets you relevant search results. "able blog" doesnt even feature you in the first page. Could you consider changing it ? 2. your tld is nice for branding, but im not sure if you know that these kind of tld have resolution issues in Asia. it would be nice if you were on a .com (even ablebio.com). https://news.yco…

Thanks for the feedback, we're still quite a small site so our authority still needs to grow. Google has said that TLD's shouldn't affect ranking. I didn't know there about the issues in Asia, thanks for mentioning this. We've looked into the use of bio and there was a case where they considered it to be appriopriate for biographical purposes. Ultimately though, we do want to get a better tld. I just can't afford it…

able.net only costs 17 dollars per year on Google Domains. This should work. :)

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#42

Post by greggman2 »

whsheet wrote: post #33
joelrunyon wrote: post #29

Just roll your own blog already. If there's one thing these services reinforce over and over again - it's that they'll change their terms over time. Own your site. Own your data. Put it all on your own terms. If you need help setting one up (unlikely for this crowd), you can have one made for you for free here. https://StartABlog.com/free-blog

I disagree. Use your time to setup something smarter than a blog. A turn-key ready static site generator still takes 10x the time to set up than just using a random blog site. Also, you waste time fiddling with CSS adjusting crappy themes. Only upside would be post editing in vim. But again, do something smarter, too many new shiny toys wait for you: Tensorflow, Haskell, Rust, ESP32... extend the list yourself.

Agree.

Switching from wordpress to a static site generator has made it much harder to post for me. Sure I can use vim (or my editor of choice) but on wordpress I could post from any browser on any machine, even a phone or tablet, including images with sites that have a front end. I'm not going back but I'd post more if I had a front end like I had on wordpress. Note: IMO as a middle solution just using github is not enough. Yes I can create a new file from the interface but no preview, clunky image uploading, clucky image embedding, and other issues.

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#45

Post by whsheet »

all2 wrote: post #37
whsheet wrote: post #31

Able looks promising: Higher information density than Medium, syntax highlighting in code blocks, no big-ass modal interrupting when I just want to read a silly blog post. Besides, Medium in its current state is one of the most annoying sites and I don't get why it enjoys such a strong SERP ranking. I mean blog posts are a commodity and Medium thinks they are Netflix showing the latest Disney property. If Google sear…

High SERP ratings come from multiple things: 1. If you use Google signed in, they know (I assume) you preference technical material (which is the bucket Medium falls in) 2. On-site links; one of the most powerful (and underutilized methods of SEO) is interlinking pages on a site. I'm not sure why this is the case, but it can be a determining factor in top-ranked sites (see Wikipedia as the canonical example of onsite…

Thanks for giving us a 101 lesson on the basics of SEO and SERP. Glad that we have some witty minds on HN.

You forgot one thing though: This modal is unnecessarily hiding content and pissing off everyone. It is reason enough to give Medium a heavy SERP penalty for many months.

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#46

Post by sandGorgon »

new_here wrote: post #24
sandGorgon wrote: post #21

three things: 1. its hard to search for you guys. your name is hard to SEO on. for example "medium kafka" gets you relevant search results. "able blog" doesnt even feature you in the first page. Could you consider changing it ? 2. your tld is nice for branding, but im not sure if you know that these kind of tld have resolution issues in Asia. it would be nice if you were on a .com (even ablebio.com). https://news.yco…

Thanks for the feedback, we're still quite a small site so our authority still needs to grow. Google has said that TLD's shouldn't affect ranking. I didn't know there about the issues in Asia, thanks for mentioning this. We've looked into the use of bio and there was a case where they considered it to be appriopriate for biographical purposes. Ultimately though, we do want to get a better tld. I just can't afford it…

its not about tld affecting ranking - its about brand keyword search matching. your brand keyword is a bit too generic to match if i search "able blog something"

you should generate names - https://deepnamer.com (nice... it just gave me writeradar.com and codeberch.com ) or https://www.punchlinedesign.net/pun_generator/code+write

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#47

Post by zschuessler »

joelrunyon wrote: post #29

Just roll your own blog already. If there's one thing these services reinforce over and over again - it's that they'll change their terms over time. Own your site. Own your data. Put it all on your own terms. If you need help setting one up (unlikely for this crowd), you can have one made for you for free here. https://StartABlog.com/free-blog

This is great advice for those who don't want discoverability. However, for everyone else, Medium going to the dark side was a huge pain because there was no alternative. They had a monopoly on the "write articles and get discovered" market.

Maybe some here don't care about discoverability, but most writers do.

To Able: thank you so much for trying to fill this void. I would recommend that you not focus solely on developer content and hit the casual crowd. We already have options for the tech savvy that work well, and none for casuals. Medium was the only good option for that. Features like the table of contents are nice for technical content, but an eyesore for casual content.

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#49

Post by new_here »

georgeoliver wrote: post #25

It's always seemed odd to me that there isn't a hosted service with a headless web/mobile CMS, compiling to a static site, that saves to a few common backends (s3, etc.), with reasonable pricing (i.e. not $10+/mo). Let the user pay for their own storage.

This is actually a really cool idea.

Re: Show HN: Able – an alternative to Medium

#50

Post by whsheet »

zschuessler wrote: post #47
joelrunyon wrote: post #29

Just roll your own blog already. If there's one thing these services reinforce over and over again - it's that they'll change their terms over time. Own your site. Own your data. Put it all on your own terms. If you need help setting one up (unlikely for this crowd), you can have one made for you for free here. https://StartABlog.com/free-blog

This is great advice for those who don't want discoverability. However, for everyone else, Medium going to the dark side was a huge pain because there was no alternative. They had a monopoly on the "write articles and get discovered" market. Maybe some here don't care about discoverability, but most writers do. To Able: thank you so much for trying to fill this void. I would recommend that you not focus solely on dev…

> hit the casual crowd

Forget the casual crowd. First reason: It’s always good to start with one demography and fulfilling their requirements. Second and TBH, the casual crowd sucks steel when creating short-form blog content.

Go to the Linkedin blogs, all non-tech Medium blogs, TED talks, Facebook: 99% is useless, already seen, self-help-type advice covered with click-baity titles.

Every Reddit post has more substance and authenticity than the mentioned above.

Edit: To the pro downvoters, instead of downvoting just reply and link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog.

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