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Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

arslan.io

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

#51

Post by ThomPete »

untog wrote: post #23
tyingq wrote: 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…

I don't hate them for trying either but it doesn't work and it's not really how conversations work best online.

If the purpose is meaningful responses then a much better strategy is to write meaningful essays which means don't write them for the audience write them for yourself.

My personal experience is that you will get lots of meaningful responses if you write about things you care about and therefore don't care about the length.

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

#52

Post by computerex »

JoshMnem wrote: 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 use Hugo with Digital Ocean and GitHub. Simple nodejs express script is running via PM2 and is listening for GitHub messages and serving as a webhook. Whenever I push to the site repo on GitHub, the webhook fires, which fires the build script, which does a git pull and executes the hugo command to rebuild the site.

It's a delightful experience.

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

#54

Post by computerex »

mercer wrote: post #29
JoshMnem wrote: 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!), fin…

Self control is an amazing skill mate.

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

#55

Post by gpmcadam »

copperx wrote: post #43
francis-io wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I originally tried github pages, but had issues with getting an SSL cert working with Cloudflare. I ended up using AWS Certificate Manager to add an auto updating cert to CloudFront.

Do you have a login? Or why would you need SSL on a static page?

You can use HTTPS to secure many things, not only login details. Not least of all, the privacy of your users/readers.

There's also integrity of your site, and many more future proof reasons. These days, there's no reason _not_ to use HTTPS, really.

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/security/encr...

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

#56

Post by s3nnyy »

CharlesW wrote: post #39
s3nnyy wrote: post #35

I feel one of the main reasons Medium is so successful is that they cracked discoverability and rank high on Google for any topic (sort of like Wikipedia). Hence, I am hesitant to move away from it although I really want to build a sustainable, long-term business on my own domain. Any ideas on this?

My advice: Publish on your own domain, syndicate to Medium (and LinkedIn, and whatever) shortly after. Always import the story[1] so that Medium adds a rel="canonical" link, and link back to the canonical version (e.g. "Originally published at XXX" in the text of the story itself. [1] https://medium.com/p/import

Did not know that this is possible. Thanks a lot! Probably there are similar import options on Linkedin et al.

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

#57

Post by rasz »

tyingq wrote: 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…

more page impressions = more ads

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

#58

Post by DamonHD »

gpmcadam wrote: post #55
copperx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a login? Or why would you need SSL on a static page?

You can use HTTPS to secure many things, not only login details. Not least of all, the privacy of your users/readers. There's also integrity of your site, and many more future proof reasons. These days, there's no reason _not_ to use HTTPS, really. https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/security/encr...

Except for the difficulty of managing and keeping up to date with TLS (I'd have to upgrade my RPi's OS for example, to do it well), and the fact that it actually reduces performance for small simple sites with local readership, even with HTTP/2 for example.

http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-carbon-cost-of-CDN.html

Edit: I note that I got downvoted, though no reply with reasons. I accept that it is currently widespread dogma/fashion that everything should be HTTPS, and there are some good reasons for it, but as someone that has worked in what might be called 'real' security in on-line finance for example, I fear that HTTPS-everywhere is as much security theatre or cargo cult as taking your belt off at the airport scanners...

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

#59

Post by s3nnyy »

dullgiulio wrote: post #38
s3nnyy wrote: post #35

I feel one of the main reasons Medium is so successful is that they cracked discoverability and rank high on Google for any topic (sort of like Wikipedia). Hence, I am hesitant to move away from it although I really want to build a sustainable, long-term business on my own domain. Any ideas on this?

How did they cracke discoverability? Some posts are famous and rank higher, I haven't noticed a general rank boost. Also, I have stumbled upon a lot of blogs on own domains that turned out to be Medium hosted. I assume these don't get any advantage on Google?

I am not sure if I am overvaluing Medium but I feel that I owe the existence of my recruiting agency to them:

- In November 2014 I published "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in tech" (https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...)

- I immediately started getting CVs from people who googled "work in Switzerland in tech". Then, I asked local startups and firms if they would pay me if I find them engineers. This worked out and now I run https://www.coderfit.com.

- After 2.5 years I still get a couple CVs a week due to the blogpost on Medium.

If one only has one or two blog posts (like me in the beginning), Medium is probably the best place to write. But now, since I want to grow my business, it feels like a waste not using my own domain.

(Fun fact: It took me three days to write this blogpost, and according to Medium 22k people (truly) read it and some even moved to Zurich with their families and their life completely changed. However, it took me one year each to write my bachelor's and master's thesis and the professor and his assistant (maybe) read it...)

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

#60

Post by bobfunk »

qznc wrote: post #15
JoshMnem wrote: 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...

It's a joke, we don't actually use neither left-pad nor is-positive-integer...
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