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Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

arslan.io

21–30 of 250 posts

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#21
post #6

I don't understand why people write programming blogs on Medium. I think that managing a live website with its own server (rather than only working on other people's projects) is a very important skill. If you don't want to manage WordPress, try a static site generator like Metalsmith: https://github.com/segmentio/metalsmith Deploy on Digital Ocean or Linode for $5/month. Free hosting options include Github Pages and…

Their day job might be managing servers :)

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#22
post #13

See also: http://practicaltypography.com/billionaires-typewriter.html

HN really need to add Matthew Butterick's sites to spamlist.

Why so? I just skimmed read the linked page (after pasting the URL manually...) and it doesn't seem any worse than other articles posted here.

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#23
post #2

"Writing comments to Medium posts feels awkward because each comment is treated as a blog post." This is also awkward from the reader point of view. Trying to follow a comment chain on medium is frustrating as it only shows the first level, diving in switches pages, and often, a need to press a second "load all comments" button. Then the back button to wind your way back up. Is there some sound reasoning for why it w…

I suspect it's because they didn't/don't want people to comment in the usual way - you can highlight text on an article and leave short comments in the relevant place if you want to do that.

I think the comments section at the end was intended more as a place for lengthy reaction posts. It's why comments have "recommend" rather than "like" as a button. I might "like" someone saying "great post!" but I'm not going to "recommend" it.

It often feels like Medium has made a product for what they want online discourse to be, rather than what it actually is. I don't hate them for trying.

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#24
post #6

I don't understand why people write programming blogs on Medium. I think that managing a live website with its own server (rather than only working on other people's projects) is a very important skill. If you don't want to manage WordPress, try a static site generator like Metalsmith: https://github.com/segmentio/metalsmith Deploy on Digital Ocean or Linode for $5/month. Free hosting options include Github Pages and…

There's more to Medium than exists on the surface. It's an entire social network of people recommending and tagging articles, newsletters, all sorts - I've gotten good long term traffic before now from posting on Medium, traffic that lasts a lot longer than a short term (but much higher) burst from a Reddit or HN post.

The problem for Medium is that it just wasn't successful enough. If a lot more people were using it, it would make sense as a social platform. But it's mostly just a blog platform people link to.

(also, being able to host a blog is an important skill, but I'd never dismiss a programmer who wrote a fascinating article just because they didn't also self-host it. I could just as easily make the case that writing clearly is an important skill, and any programmer who wrote an incoherent blog post is not worth their salt. But I won't.)

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#25
Medium is a blog platform and a news aggregator. I use it mostly for consuming news by using tags of interest. Good luck with that writing your own blog on your own server. Oh, and the daily newsletter is a delightful joy.

Discoverability is key to the success of Medium.

https://medium.com/tag/swift/latest

https://medium.com/tag/kotlin/latest

https://medium.com/tag/python/latest

https://medium.com/tag/java/latest

Or by topic

https://medium.com/tag/design/latest

https://medium.com/tag/UX/latest

https://medium.com/tag/AI/latest

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#26
post #6

I don't understand why people write programming blogs on Medium. I think that managing a live website with its own server (rather than only working on other people's projects) is a very important skill. If you don't want to manage WordPress, try a static site generator like Metalsmith: https://github.com/segmentio/metalsmith Deploy on Digital Ocean or Linode for $5/month. Free hosting options include Github Pages and…

For me the main problem with self hosting is that I ended up spending more time tinkering with the website than actually writing content for it.

A hosted platform like Medium or Svbtle solves this problem.

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#27
post #15
post #6

I don't understand why people write programming blogs on Medium. I think that managing a live website with its own server (rather than only working on other people's projects) is a very important skill. If you don't want to manage WordPress, try a static site generator like Metalsmith: https://github.com/segmentio/metalsmith Deploy on Digital Ocean or Linode for $5/month. Free hosting options include Github Pages and…

I did not know Netlify and looked it up. I found this image [0] on their features page. Is that a joke or does their cli tool really use left-pad? [0] https://www.netlify.com/img/features/section-art/dev-tools.p...

I think it's a joke (npm doesn't list it).

I would say the next two packages were just joke names, but apparently "is-positive-integer" does exist[1]... though I suppose it might still be a more elaborate joke, but 1000+ downloads per month? The JavaScript world is simply amazing.

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-positive-integer

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#29
post #6

I don't understand why people write programming blogs on Medium. I think that managing a live website with its own server (rather than only working on other people's projects) is a very important skill. If you don't want to manage WordPress, try a static site generator like Metalsmith: https://github.com/segmentio/metalsmith Deploy on Digital Ocean or Linode for $5/month. Free hosting options include Github Pages and…

I can't speak for others, but one reason why I'd use something like Medium is precisely to ensure that I don't manage anything by myself except for the content production part.

I have a long list of attempts at setting up my own site, but because it's mine I wanted to get it just right. And so down the rabbit hole I go: making sure my server is super-secure (because it's important hey I'll learn in the process!), finally trying out Caddy, using Ghost (node.js), building my own static site generator using React for the backend, which of course means updating and perfecting my Ultimate Front-End Setup.

And once that's done, I want to do right by the design, and of course make sure my html/css/js is impeccable and that it all runs on every browser under the sun.

Of course I love doing this and I learn a lot from it, but if my goal is to write stuff and put it online, this approach never really works. I'm happy it doesn't, because it means I still love what I do more than writing about what I do, but it's one very legitimate reason to use something like Medium.

Re: Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

#30

I recently wanted to move my Tumblr personal blog to Medium however after a few days of nightmare and still unable to setup a custom domain despite having paid $75 fee i requested a refund and closed my account. Their customer service and documentation kind of sucks!

It's sad that a process like this is still somehow manual. I can't imagine what technical debt they must have where they can't automate custom domains.
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