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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

#191

Post by superasn »

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…

Amazon S3 is also a great option for hosting static content. The cost are negligible because you only pay for bandwidth not hosting.

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

#192

Post by BinaryIdiot »

ship_it wrote: post #188
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Because doing that yourself is a complete waste of time. Every web developer knows how to make a blog. All of them. So who cares if I make one or not to post my opinions online? No one. So you can either spend the t…

> So you can either spend the time dealing with server load, updates, maintenance, etc on a project everyone already knows how to develop and proves absolutely nothing about your skills or knowledge Wait, what? The man just give you an option to use static site generator, and he even included the link of one. The cost of using this instead of Medium is absolutely nothing (Github account offer page hosting).

> Wait, what? The man just give you an option to use static site generator, and he even included the link of one. The cost of using this instead of Medium is absolutely nothing (Github account offer page hosting).

What you seem to be getting at is that your time is worth absolutely nothing and that it is worth using your time to create a simple, static blog and hosting it somewhere free.

I disagree that your time is worth nothing but maybe we value our time differently. Regardless it misses my point: if I'm comparing one developer to another it's never going to even enter my mind that they may or may not have developed their own blog because it's an entirely pointless distinction.

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

#193

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

Personally, I never write comments on blog posts, but I participate in communities like Hacker News and a couple random subreddits.

I prefer including links to Hacker News or Reddit in the blog post. I'm not interested in handling authentication, moderating users, or dealing with spam. News aggregators usually do a great job with all those points.

The Webmention [0] spec solves this problem, but sadly, it hasn't been widely adopted. :(

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webmention

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

#194

Post by ohfouroneone »

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 have a Medium account and my own blog. On Medium I get about 5K+ readers/month. On my blog I get 5. That's why people write on Medium.

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

#195

Post by another-dave »

OtterCoder wrote: post #160
rainbowmverse wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-control is mostly just arranging your life to avoid situations that are known to cause problems.

And that doesn't take skill?

Not that it doesn't take skill, but not putting yourself in that situation (by using something off the shelf) is applying that skill :)

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

#196

Post by DamonHD »

RodericDay wrote: post #181
DamonHD wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If all inoffensive sites ditched HTTPS, merely making an HTTPS request would justifiably arouse suspicion. It's important to make sure that inoffensive sites are behind the same barrier, to make that a poor signal.

We have to hurt everyone to attempt to mask this weak signal?

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

#197

Post by s3nnyy »

user5994461 wrote: post #158
s3nnyy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not to be dismissive but I think you forgot very important issues, biased to your personal situation. 1) Switzerland doesn't speak English, it doesn't even have one language. You don't feel it because you are German. One is going to have a hard time in Zurich if he doesn't speak German. 2) Considering a 20 years old insurance and a shared flat is surreal. All cities are affordable when you live in a dump with flatmat…

I disagree with everything you wrote. From what you say, it seems you never lived here and you must be trolling.

Regarding 1) I can give you at least three personal contacts who can not speak German and get by well in Zurich. You have people living here for 10 years and don't speak German. 30% people living in the city don't hold a Swiss passport which makes it the city with the biggest "foreigner" rate (higher than London or Berlin)

Switzerland is the best place to have a family because cities are very small. I am surprised how many people don't get this. I recently overheard a discussion of a bunch of bankers in the train (One Swiss guy, two English guys). They UK-guys could not understand that most people "don't live in the city". The reason is this: It takes you 8 min by train from the city center into "nature"(e.g., Zurich HB -> Schlieren or Stettbach). In NYC, London or Berlin it's more like one hour. That means if you work "in the city" and if you are ok to commute like 10 minutes, you can get a very good and cheap apartment.

I even know one Phd student who earns 4000 CHF (waiter's salary) and feeds his wife and two kids from that money. This is unthinkable in Germany or any other place I know.

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

#198

Post by edem »

The OP forgot to mention the worst (IMHO) problem: Medium does not support multi-language content (more here: https://medium.com/@oleksiy/multilingual-content-management-...). If I write posts in English or Hungarian it is okay. But when I start to write in both my readers will see unreadable gibberish when they come to my page and half of the content will be noise for them and it can't be helped.

That's why I do it the other way around. I have my own domain and page which runs on a custom Jekyll / GitHub Pages setup and I import stories to Medium from my page.

This way I can keep using medium and get more readers for free but Medium will display the "Originally posted at ..." line at the bottom. Win-win! You should try this out and use Medium for what it is useful for.

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

#199

Post by needlessly »

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…

You don't understand that medium gets more traffic than someone's personal website.

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

#200

Post by needlessly »

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…

If i am a chef, sometimes I'm tired and just want to order take out. Same applies for a dev posting on medium
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