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Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

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Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#91

Post by bllguo »

ajkjk wrote: post #89
eugenhotaj wrote: post #7

I honestly don't get posts like these. IMHO the main selling point of Medium is not that you can easily set up a blog, there's plenty of platforms that let you do that easily, or great tools like OP's for setting up your own. The point is that there is already a large audience you can reach with your posts, and Medium actively works to distribute your posts to people who would be interested in them. The equivalent he…

I often feel like the tech industry has a huge blind spot around "not doing things that make people hate you", and that conversations around tech tend not to factor "hate" (or 'resentment' if you prefer) into making things appealing. For example I mostly hate Facebook for the choices they have made for years, and if I was ever going to stop hating them it would be after many years of sacrificial demonstration that th…

If you had framed this as being about personal ethics and morals, it would have been much easier to agree with. Maybe even admirable. Describing it as some kind of irrational hate just sounds silly.

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#92

Post by restingrobot »

duiker101 wrote: post #2

I don't have a blog (medium or anything) so unfortunately I don't have a use for this, but I LOVED the gif. It wasn't an attempt to show "how easy it is to do with one command" but rather a real flow of how it all goes, I appreciate it, well done!

While I think the usage of a gif is awesome, I am a huge fan of actually allowing people to see what is happening. The purpose of the gif was to show how it works, but he moved so fast I could barely read anything or follow him.

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#93

Post by ajkjk »

bllguo wrote: post #91
ajkjk wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often feel like the tech industry has a huge blind spot around "not doing things that make people hate you", and that conversations around tech tend not to factor "hate" (or 'resentment' if you prefer) into making things appealing. For example I mostly hate Facebook for the choices they have made for years, and if I was ever going to stop hating them it would be after many years of sacrificial demonstration that th…

If you had framed this as being about personal ethics and morals, it would have been much easier to agree with. Maybe even admirable. Describing it as some kind of irrational hate just sounds silly.

Then you and I work differently, and I will stand by my claim that if you/OP don't factor in 'irrational' hate, you won't understand people's behavior.

Anyway, the underlying principle is one of morals and ethics, in a sense. The sensations of hate, resentment, or disgust are the outward manifestation of a calculation to determine who to trust. Naturally, someone who repeatedly screws you for personal gain should not be trusted. The result is the feeling of hating them.

But it is not only about raw 'utility'. Someone who does annoying things (Medium), or demonstrating tremendous hubris or arrogance, or just does things that are or should be inappropriate, gets resented also. If you send me lots of unsolicited emails, I can find a way to explain why I hate you in terms of a utility calculation ("you are taking up space in my attention that I don't want to give you"), but that's just hand-waving -- I just hate you (to some mild degree) and I'm working backwards from that.

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#94

Post by welder »

Related, I wrote a Python library[1] that takes MD/HTML/TXT as input and gives you estimated read time for that content. That combined with Flask and you've got a great blog with read time calculated going forward, while exporting from Medium looks to only preserve read time for past posts not future ones.

1. https://github.com/alanhamlett/readtime

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#96

Post by anchpop »

grx wrote: post #65

Why? Sadly, there's not much motivation described in the README. You state "Let's move your Medium content to your very own website" and then you push it to Github and Netlify, which are yet another silos. Good work with the export, but migrating the content to the next vendor lock-in should be optional. Not to forget that these platforms also collect data about your visitors.

How does Github "collect data about your visitors"? The repository is cloned, built and served by Netlify's server. And since I doubt Netlify is injecting any js into my site, I also question the extent to which they can track users.

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#97

Post by metalock »

ideophobia wrote: post #29
eugenhotaj wrote: post #7

I honestly don't get posts like these. IMHO the main selling point of Medium is not that you can easily set up a blog, there's plenty of platforms that let you do that easily, or great tools like OP's for setting up your own. The point is that there is already a large audience you can reach with your posts, and Medium actively works to distribute your posts to people who would be interested in them. The equivalent he…

I 100% agree. I don't need a Medium alternative that let's me write blog posts from a cloud hosted Python IDE using a color-coded braille keyboard. I just want an efficient editor, clean interface for readers, and as much help as possible getting my posts in front of people. Medium can check all three in my mind. I'd infinitely prefer to see (and pay for) new and different ways to build ecosystems with which my blog…

by putting up a paywall, medium does the opposite: they are actively stopping your readership from seeing your articles.

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#98

Post by DanHulton »

fiveoak wrote: post #9

Honestly I really appreciate tools like this exist but I'll probably keep using Medium out of laziness. I don't want to have to worry about maintaining my own blog and I'm cheap so I don't really want to pay for hosted Ghost/Wordpress since I'm not trying to make money off of my infrequent dumb blog posts. The cheapest Ghost plan is $29/mo :(

Ghost is pretty easy to set up on a $5/month Linode box, for what it's worth. That's where I host mine. Definitely took longer than entering a couple forms on Medium, but if you consider both as a % of time you'd spend writing, it shrinks to effectively nothing pretty quickly.

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#99

Post by dceddia »

anchpop wrote: post #96
grx wrote: post #65

Why? Sadly, there's not much motivation described in the README. You state "Let's move your Medium content to your very own website" and then you push it to Github and Netlify, which are yet another silos. Good work with the export, but migrating the content to the next vendor lock-in should be optional. Not to forget that these platforms also collect data about your visitors.

How does Github "collect data about your visitors"? The repository is cloned, built and served by Netlify's server. And since I doubt Netlify is injecting any js into my site, I also question the extent to which they can track users.

Netlify is serving the content, so at the very least, they (and/or the CDN they store the files on) will have a server-side access log of every visitor. Maybe that's not "tracking" per-se, but, if enough sites are hosted on Netlify, they could correlate the visits.

As far as I know, Netlify doesn't make this data available to users hosting sites on the platform.

My own (perhaps paranoid) theory as to why Netlify is able to provide so much for free is that they're selling the access log data, but I haven't seen any proof of that either, so who knows.

Another theory is that storing all those access logs would be huge and maybe they just store nothing...

Re: Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog

#100

Post by jpomykala »

grx wrote: post #65

Why? Sadly, there's not much motivation described in the README. You state "Let's move your Medium content to your very own website" and then you push it to Github and Netlify, which are yet another silos. Good work with the export, but migrating the content to the next vendor lock-in should be optional. Not to forget that these platforms also collect data about your visitors.

and Gatsby... now you need to maintain this. It’s much better to use something simple like Jekyll. You don’t need all these fancy stuff like GraphQl, SCSS, React etc. And Jekyll can be served directly from Github.
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