Why I left Medium and moved back to my own domain • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by cyberferret » Sun, Jul 30, 2017, 10:17 PM UTC

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…

+1 for Ghost - it is really lightweight, and I have a blog running on it on a $5/mo Digital Ocean instance.

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

#142

Post by cyberferret » Sun, Jul 30, 2017, 10:21 PM UTC

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?

Any time I have to embed code in Medium, I just type the code in a free Github Gist and post the link - Medium automatically embeds the Gist in a nice, syntax highlighted format, with a link to the original gist.

e.g. (towards bottom of this article I wrote - syntax highlighting in HTML, Javascript and Ruby snippets): https://hackernoon.com/building-a-face-recognition-web-app-i...

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

#143

Post by Antrikshy » Sun, Jul 30, 2017, 10:27 PM UTC

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…

Medium is great and you have perfectly legitimate reasons to use it. But if you ever consider setting up your own website and/or blog, look into Jekyll (the site builder) and GitHub Pages for hosting.

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

#144

Post by user5994461 » Sun, Jul 30, 2017, 10:39 PM UTC

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…

>>> 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.

No.

Sites replaced the "like" button because it was found to be inappropriate in too many circumstances.

For instance, you don't want to "like" an article titled "328 people dead in a train collision" and have your feed show "untog liked 328 people dead in a train collision".

FYI, Facebook allows publishers to pick a few names for the like button instead of like.

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

#145

Post by tchaffee » Sun, Jul 30, 2017, 10:39 PM UTC

sixQuarks wrote: post #17

Moral of the story: Try to never rely on another company's platform for your business. It's hard enough creating a successful business, but to add a layer of risk on top of that is not smart.

Github, an ISP, mobile phone company, rented offices, an OS, hardware, and the list is almost endless. I actually think it's important to outsource as much as you can and focus on your core business.

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

#146

Post by user5994461 » Sun, Jul 30, 2017, 10:45 PM UTC

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?

Google will discover anything. It is incredibly good at discovery.

It doesn't matter that you have a medium or something else.

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

#147

Post by ValentineC » Sun, Jul 30, 2017, 10:56 PM UTC

corobo wrote: post #120

cupcakestand wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

I'm still falling through the very same hole. What made you pick WordPress?

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

#148

Post by xtracto » Sun, Jul 30, 2017, 11:00 PM UTC

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've been using ghost and digitalocean for my CV site for some time (godinez.soy) and it has been amazingly easy.

As you, I never understood the attraction of the Medium platform for technical people. I mean, Blogspot was there long before them and multiply.com even before (for non-technical people).

For non-tech people I understand the value of it, however given the speed at how companies fold nowadays, I would not be happy giving away control of my content to someone else.

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

#149

Post by nickjj » Sun, Jul 30, 2017, 11:09 PM UTC

steventhedev wrote: post #96

copperx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same applies to GitHub pages.

GHP means you're subject to github's downtime, which tends towards more frequent than s3 (outside us-east-1). Worse, you can't run HTTPS with GHP and a custom domain. You could use CloudFlare's flexible TLS, but it's unsecured from their system to your site, which has resulted in carrier level content being injected[0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12091900

That's what got me to host my Jekyll sites on my own too (lack of proper end-to-end SSL on a custom domain).

Also, if you're not using S3 / CloudFront you can use Let's Encrypt to issue free SSL certificates on any cloud hosting provider.

It's an awesome set up once you know how to get everything up and running.

I even recently released a course[0] that explains how to do it step by step (setting up a custom domain, hosting multiple sites on 1 DigitalOcean server, A+ SSL ratings for both nginx and Apache, etc.).

It takes less than 1 minute to deploy and protect any custom site (or web app), since the course comes with ready to go configs and scripts too.

[0]: https://httpswithletsencrypt.com/

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

#150

Post by chipotle_coyote » Sun, Jul 30, 2017, 11:09 PM UTC

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…

It's the visibility, yes. I just moved my various blogging endeavors to one domain (coyotetracks.org) rather than the mishmash I've been using, which includes a few articles on Medium. But with only those few articles, I have over 400 followers on Medium, and my most popular article has 59K reads and 175 recommendations. (The next most popular has 39K and only 10 recommendations, because it's a criticism of "Mr. Money Mustache" and most people are hate-reading it from a link from his web site. Article #3 drops down to a mere 2.3K views, but 51 recommendations.)

I moved to hosting my own WordPress site; as much as I think WordPress's internals are a garbage file (actually, a series of garbage files passed around as globals, but never mind), it's so easy to make work--and the ecosystem is so big--that it almost makes up for its nastiness. But when I write an article that seems "Medium-esque," there's a very good chance I'm going to crosspost it to Medium to attempt to get those views. (With links back to my main web site, of course.)