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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

#81

Post by Someone »

gboudrias wrote: post #75
cupcakestand wrote: post #69

To the point criticism of Medium, very detailed and the OP is picking the right issues of Medium. While Medium looks so beautiful and clean at first glance it really disappoints when you use it on a daily base both as a creator and as a user. Everytime I use Medium, I am surprised that Medium is successful. Its appearance feels definitely premium and significantly of higher value than any other blog system but the us…

> Which blog system should we use? Hosting your own WordPress site? It's simple and easy. Why did anyone ever want to be on Medium in the first place? Most likely for the name association and the visibility that comes with it. I think we have a responsibility to promote self-reliance as part of technological culture. If we want people to move away from centralization (which I do), we have to teach by example (which I…

"Hosting your own WordPress site? It's simple and easy."

I would think that, for at least 90% of those publishing on Medium, that's neither simple nor easy.

Even ignoring that, hosting your own Wordpress site means taking responsibility for keeping it up to date, security-wise. That hurdle alone probably makes most bloggers use some third-party blogging provider.

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

#82

Post by cupcakestand »

gboudrias wrote: post #75
cupcakestand wrote: post #69

To the point criticism of Medium, very detailed and the OP is picking the right issues of Medium. While Medium looks so beautiful and clean at first glance it really disappoints when you use it on a daily base both as a creator and as a user. Everytime I use Medium, I am surprised that Medium is successful. Its appearance feels definitely premium and significantly of higher value than any other blog system but the us…

> Which blog system should we use? Hosting your own WordPress site? It's simple and easy. Why did anyone ever want to be on Medium in the first place? Most likely for the name association and the visibility that comes with it. I think we have a responsibility to promote self-reliance as part of technological culture. If we want people to move away from centralization (which I do), we have to teach by example (which I…

Wordpress is for sure powerful, has a huge ecosystem and is for teams a safe bet because of very good and battle-tested workflows.

But sorry, I don't want to setup a stack I did 20 years ago. However, I haven't looked into Wordpress for years.

For simple personal blogs I like DB-free SSG blog systems. But I am still wondering which one is the best. Just Hexo (Node) and Hugo (Go) come to my mind.

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

#83

Post by rhizome »

gboudrias wrote: post #75
cupcakestand wrote: post #69

To the point criticism of Medium, very detailed and the OP is picking the right issues of Medium. While Medium looks so beautiful and clean at first glance it really disappoints when you use it on a daily base both as a creator and as a user. Everytime I use Medium, I am surprised that Medium is successful. Its appearance feels definitely premium and significantly of higher value than any other blog system but the us…

> Which blog system should we use? Hosting your own WordPress site? It's simple and easy. Why did anyone ever want to be on Medium in the first place? Most likely for the name association and the visibility that comes with it. I think we have a responsibility to promote self-reliance as part of technological culture. If we want people to move away from centralization (which I do), we have to teach by example (which I…

I agree, there's an air of "my gardener moved away, how ever will my grass get cut now?"

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

#84

Post by dullgiulio »

s3nnyy wrote: post #59
dullgiulio wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nah, I don't think it's Medium. That article featured here on HN and was commented a lot, I remember it myself.

I think it was a good article about a niche topic. Maybe being on Medium helped in making it viral to begin with...

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

#85

Post by cupcakestand »

giobox wrote: post #49
mercer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've had largely the same experiences. Recently I decided to challenge myself to instead keep it simple, rather than treat the whole thing as a "learn some new thing along the way" type exercise. The end result is I actually have a blog I'm actually writing on that is absurdly easy to maintain, rather than the usual (for me anyway!) 75 percent complete side project in some new technology I'll never get around to fini…

> Simple VPS, webserver, letsencrypt, static site generator, cloud flare for CDN duties and a little CSS.

Why didn't you host on Github Pages and you could have saved all that but having the same flexibilty regarding a SSG use case?

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

#86

Post by magic_beans »

addicted wrote: post #78
cupcakestand wrote: post #69

To the point criticism of Medium, very detailed and the OP is picking the right issues of Medium. While Medium looks so beautiful and clean at first glance it really disappoints when you use it on a daily base both as a creator and as a user. Everytime I use Medium, I am surprised that Medium is successful. Its appearance feels definitely premium and significantly of higher value than any other blog system but the us…

As a reader I avoid Medium based articles. For one thing, the UI for wildly different blogs are the same. This means that I am unable to place anything I read in context. As a visual learner, one of the ways I remember stuff I read is by remembering the entire context (for blogs this is usually the look of the blog). Medium completely eliminates that crutch for me. I feel the overuse of annoying funny GIFs in the mid…

Medium blogs all have different colored nav-bars and logos.

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

#88

Post by rhizome »

cupcakestand wrote: post #72
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…

Totally agree. Code embedding is also limited on Medium, I think they still lack syntax highlighting. Btw, great tip wih Netlify. How is your experience with them, what are pros cons compared to Github Pages and can I run server code like Node for free?

OT, but syntax highlighting is hardly the weakest part of displaying code on a webpage. Nobody's disrupting horizontal scrollbars or margin-busting, but the first person who does is going to be a hero.

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

#89

Post by sigstoat »

cupcakestand wrote: post #76
pavel_lishin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not the same sort of skill as, say, doing low-level graphics programming, or database query optimization. Just because you're a programmer doesn't mean you're a web developer. It's like saying that it doesn't make sense for a carpenter to live in a house they didn't build, or for a heart surgeon not to pull out his own wisdom teeth.

I disagree. It doesn't matter what kind of coder you are, at some point you always deal with a shell. And setting up a blog on bare metal is done in few minutes on a shell. If you have never faced a shell or a remote server as a developer then you should find a toy project to do so. It's not the worst skill to have. Moreover, I wouldn't see basic HTML or CSS as specific knowledge. This is something every coder knows…

> Moreover, I wouldn't see basic HTML or CSS as specific knowledge. This is something every coder knows (like English), of course not advanced layout stuff like Flexbox but the basic of HTML and CSS are common knowledge

i work in a building full of embedded developers who wouldn't know a css selector if it bit them on the ass.

what use is it to any of them?

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

#90

Post by cupcakestand »

BartSaM wrote: post #64
simik wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are constantly "Temporarily sold out", at least in European regions.

They are available, but only in NY and one more (not sure which). I have confirmed this with their support. I am not sure if they are planning to introduce them in other regions anytime soon. I think NY is pretty much a good global location for America + Europe markets.

Agree that for a western English audience NY is the best location reaching both the US and EU with a ok latency.
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