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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

#111

Post by giobox »

tomc1985 wrote: post #102
giobox wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> cloud flare for CDN duties Unless you're pulling a lot of traffic this isn't necessary

True, but the free account is trivial to setup, and because entire site is static I can use cloud flare to cache the entire thing. They also have some nice features entirely unrelated to scale ("Always Online" is a good example).

Given the barrier to doing this is virtually non-existent (it's a handful of clicks on the CloudFlare dashboard), seems silly not to take advantage.

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

#112

Post by pm215 »

cupcakestand wrote: post #94
sigstoat wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> i work in a building full of embedded developers who wouldn't know a css selector if it bit them on the ass. Maybe, maybe not. Even embedded coders face HTML/CSS at some point when their embedded devices incorporates a webserver for some admin interface which sends HTML/CSS to the world (e.g. a router). Or they have create an API doc for their newly created embedded system, on the web. There are many examples. What…

HTML is really not all that ubiquitous. The breadth of the technological world is wide... In any case, from my point of view the question is not "could I put together a virtual server with some kind of blogging software on it?" (I'm sure I could) but "is that the most interesting/important/worthwhile thing for me to do with my limited time?" and "do I want to give myself the ongoing maintenance chore of ensuring that the server and software stack is up to date with security updates?". Those two things are why I host my rather-intermittently-updated technical blog on wordpress.com.

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

#113

Post by giobox »

cupcakestand wrote: post #85
giobox wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's a hugely popular option for sure, and great for a ton of static site use cases, but you do sacrifice the flexibility of deploying whatever the hell you want on your own VPS. Who knows what I might want to do in the future?

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

#114

Post by rattray »

vilmosi wrote: post #100
freehunter wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commenting on articles is a terrible method of interaction. Anti-spam is hard, and spammers always win. Trolls always win. Comments rarely add much to the discussion from the article, and they're often hard to follow. There's no reason to leave a comment saying "great post!". It's spam. It's unnecessary. Blogs are a wholly inappropriate place for back-and-forth discourse to happen simply because if I have a blog, it'…

> Commenting on articles is a terrible method of interaction. Anti-spam is hard, and spammers always win. Trolls always win. But that's practically what HN is, yet I like to believe it's a good platform without too much spam or trolls.

That makes me curious as to the mechanisms hn employs to combat spam. I've never seen a comment I've been able to tell was spam, which is impressive.

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

#115

Post by jjeaff »

DamonHD wrote: post #58
gpmcadam wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For most sites, the Google organic search penalty for not having https is reason enough.

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

#116

Post by sah2ed »

rattray wrote: post #114
vilmosi wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Commenting on articles is a terrible method of interaction. Anti-spam is hard, and spammers always win. Trolls always win. But that's practically what HN is, yet I like to believe it's a good platform without too much spam or trolls.

That makes me curious as to the mechanisms hn employs to combat spam. I've never seen a comment I've been able to tell was spam, which is impressive.

Visit your HN profile then set "showdead" to "yes" to see some of such comments.

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

#117

Post by justanton »

crispytx wrote: post #109
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 Medium because I think their blogging software is superior to their competitors (WordPress). If there was something out there as good as Medium that I could install on my own servers I might do that. This seems to be the hierarchy of blogging software to me: Medium > WordPress > Blogger I'm sure there are some other really great options out there that I've never heard of. And I'm sure if you spend a great deal…

Did you try Ghost (https://ghost.org)? Their editor is quite good. Also, they've released version 1.0 a few days ago.

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

#118

Post by katpas »

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'm a Web developer and I could manage my own blog site but I choose not to as it would be one more site I have to maintain. I'd rather put that time into building the product for my company or sleeping/doing something else.

To suggest that any half way decent programmer should do that is the same as suggesting you write all your css from scratch instead of using a front end library to help. Doable but ultimately is it the best use of your time?

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

#119

Post by DamonHD »

calcifer wrote: post #104
DamonHD wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The one thing that HTTPS provides on non-sensitive, or even non-interactive sites is privacy; it hides the request URI from prying eyes (ISP, government etc.) That's worth a lot to me.

My sites are totally anodyne and not going to cause anyone any embarrassment; bank auditors tell me to relax a bit. The Chinese government was happy to grant me a site 'licence'.

That's not worth a slow-to-load or even failing-to-load page.

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

#120

Post by corobo »

cupcakestand wrote: post #85
giobox wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Why didn't you host on Github Pages

Tried that once, fell down a 3 day rabbit hole trying all the static blog generators.. ended up picking WordPress.

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