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Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain

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

#121

Post by DamonHD »

jjeaff wrote: post #115
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…

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

I have run side-by-side tests with the same site exposed both over http and https from a very performant CDN, and right now Google showed the http site on a simple search, not https, for example.

I don't believe that any penalty is currently significant, nor likely to be soon. There's plenty of good historic sites which SEs don't want to exclude just because someone doesn't have the resources to rework them and keep them maintained with the latest TLS. (Note issues like embedded http resources that would all have to transitively converted to avoid warnings.)

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

#122

Post by Matt3o12_ »

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…

Having a Webserver is not that simple. Even if you knew HTML and CSS good enough to make decent looking blog, there are many things that are not so simple:

- installing the basics. Why would I know if I should use Apache or Nginx. The internet is no help for that and while both are easy to use, it is not obvious how to publish a blog. You might also need other systems such as a MySQL db if you want to use Wordpress to publish. And I wouldn't expect a Postgres to know how to use MySQL

- securing the server. I would not expect everyone to know how to secure a server. There are some many things that are hard. Even iptables is not easy if you use it for the first time (don't get my started on firewalld). More advanced things such as AppArmour or SELiunx are freaking overwhelmingly when you use it for the fist time and only use a shell. Those things take time to learn and get right. It is useless if you set up the ip tables correctly but save them incorrectly so they flush after a reboot.

- keeping the server up to date. It requires discipline to active look for updates and act once they are discovered. Why would a embedded programmer want to bother.

- price: while 5 bucks is not much for many of us, it adds up, Especially when you have many such little things. Secondly, such a cheap server might not be enough. You need backups which requires additional work. Furthermore, if you do not use a static website, the hacker news front page could quickly overwhelm such a little server (it might even be hard with a static website).

These are all reasons why one should not use their own server for that. If you want to learn a lot about web servers, having a blog is a good and valuable start but I would never expect anyone to do that

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

#123

Post by tomc1985 »

giobox wrote: post #111
tomc1985 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe... but everything was so wonderfully independent before Cloudflare gets dragged in

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

#124

Post by matwood »

Kenji wrote: post #74
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.

If you're a halfway decent programmer, deploying a simple blog is trivial. There are many existing solutions that don't even require you to write a single line of code, and the problem is simple enough that you could write the entire thing yourself.

> If you're a halfway decent programmer, deploying a simple blog is trivial.

The first thing a halfway decent programmer learns is to not reinvent the wheel. I could implement some json library, but I have better things to do. I could deploy and manage wordpress, but that would be a waste of my time.

This relates to a post from the last couple days where a potential game programmer got lost in some random issue instead of focusing on making a fun game. When blogging, content should be the focus, not managing a website.

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

#125

Post by corobo »

cupcakestand wrote: post #91
Entangled wrote: post #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…

Why should I discover content on Medium? This job is done by HN and Reddit and unfortunately Facebook if I am on FB. I don't have time to get sucked in another feed.

Specific content. For example I follow the Laravel tag on medium, I've not seen anything regarding Laravel on HN in a fair while.

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

#127

Post by movedx »

computerex wrote: post #52
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.

That build process can be done using TravisCI for free, provided the GitHub repository containing your Hugo base is public (and why wouldn't it be?) This removes the need for that Droplet and its associated cost.

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

#128

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

cupcakestand wrote: post #97
sigstoat wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe, maybe not. uh it isn't some sort of weird toss-up? i'm referring to specific people who i know. > 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. there's a whole world of e…

Ok, it's hard to imagine that such people exist but I believe what you say. You are right, they should rather use Medium.

I'll use my Father as an example. He works for Autodesk, before that he worked for Revit (when they were a tiny startup before Autodesk bought them out). He writes code in C++ mostly (I think some C# these days). He doesn't use HTML or CSS, and has never learned either. Not because he can't, just because there's not been any point and because the amount of effort that would take is large enough to not be worth it. Why spend several hours or days of extra effort just for a blog post? Not to mention the extra money needed to buy a domain and hosting.

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

#129

Post by movedx »

bdcravens wrote: post #98
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…

Why would a programmer use Github when they could easily run Gitlab on Digital Ocean?

GitHub's UI is far superior, for one. You're also placing your code in an ecosystem of other OSS projects, which I believe is a good thing.

Also, GitHub private repositories for an individual are far cheaper than running a H/A GitLab on DO, AWS, Linode, or any provider worth mentioning. By definition of running a H/A solution on DO's cheapest offering, you're paying $15/month for three VMs, and we haven't started talking about backups yet.

It's not worth it at all.

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

#130

Post by movedx »

loomer wrote: post #36
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…

One of the main reasons people use Medium is that their posts will be viewed by random Medium users in addition to their own fan base, thus growing their fan base and getting more views both in the short and long term. I'd compare it to YouTube. People could theoretically host their own videos, but the main reason people use YouTube is because it is so much easier for others to discover your videos. Also, +1 on using…

> I'd compare it to YouTube. People could theoretically host their own videos, but the main reason people use YouTube is because it is so much easier for others to discover your videos.

I appreciate the effort to create a comparison or analogy here, but hosting video is a far, far bigger problem than hosting some text. Bandwidth costs will reach into the thousands of dollars per month video that gets a few thousands views, which isn't hard to get on YouTube's platform.

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