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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

#231
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tal…

What is the nr. 1 thing you would change in GitLab to improve the UI?

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

#232
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was so close to doing this when I was making my new blog, then I found out that the CSS element responsible for making the code block scollable isn't supported on mobile.

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

#233
Not to be a horrible self promoter (it's just the ideas I care about), but my 2012 discussion of the problem with new blogging platforms still applies, from a general perspective, to Medium: https://alanhogan.com/the-problem-with-new-blog-platforms. (tl;dr is that eventually you will grow out of virtually any non-Wordpress platform, especially one you don’t control yourself.)

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

#234
A commentator on Arslan's post mentions “Medium’s foolproof wysiwyg editor.” This surprised me. I find their WYSIWYG editor to be incredibly frustrating, counter-intuitive, limiting, and obnoxious.

Allow me to belabor only the last point.

Imagine typing the following sentence (I’m using pipe | to show the cursor):

  Clifford is a big dog.
But it's missing something, so you move your insertion point:

  Clifford is a big| dog.
and you type “red.” In any sane editor, the result will be exactly what you typed:

  Clifford is a big red| dog.
But on Medium, the result is:

  Clifford is a big red|dog.

Clifford is a big reddog? Ffffff. This happened because when you typed the first space after “big”, the result was not the insertion of a space but in fact the same as if you had hit the "right arrow" key:

  Clifford is a big |dog.
Not cool. I have a strong habit of inserting words with the surrounding spaces already inserted. How dare Medium forbid me to type the way I want?

I know that Medium does this because they are on a crusade to kill the usage of two spaces after sentence. That doesn’t excuse insane frustration of the editing process. No wonder most Medium posts don't look like they have ever experienced the most cursory proofreading!

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

#235
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because when I switched to Medium my blog posts went from ~50 impressions to 1000+ impressions Exposure.

Are you using a custom domain with Medium?

No I opted for no-domain because my articles can be sequestered to any publication where they will receive better exposure than if I had reserved it for my own.

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

#236

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?

GitHub suspended my account because I used it to host a "for-profit" website, which led to the website being down for several days before I checked. I believe the last time I checked the TOS, no such mention was made for Github pages.

> GitHub suspended my account because I used it to host a "for-profit" website, which led to the website being down for several days before I checked.

What kind of website were you hosting?

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

#237
post #213

Switched long time ago to Blogger--free to use your domain, change template design as you like as much as you like, connect external widgets like Disqus (my blog to check how Blogger may look: http://blog.babich.me/ ). Also, a huge thing is integration with Google Photos and Google Drive. You may insert in a post photos from your Google Photo right by selecting them inside an image addition menu--no need in hustling…

One of the things I hate the most about Blogger is their stupid JS template where on mobile swiping left/right (to move the page if you're zoomed in) switches to the next/previous post instead.

I just rewrote the template completely. It's not that hard. So I do not have to deal with standard templates issues.

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

#238
post #213

Switched long time ago to Blogger--free to use your domain, change template design as you like as much as you like, connect external widgets like Disqus (my blog to check how Blogger may look: http://blog.babich.me/ ). Also, a huge thing is integration with Google Photos and Google Drive. You may insert in a post photos from your Google Photo right by selecting them inside an image addition menu--no need in hustling…

Yes but since it is owned by Google I'm afraid that they will shut it down on a whim

I do not think so. Too many blogs are there that provide Google with data and show Google Ads. It's a valuable asset for Google.

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

#239
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?

Because Github is, for the time being, what everybody else is using. You can't go wrong choosing Github in terms of users and contributors being familiar with the interface.

That said, I only use Github as a mirror. My "master" repositories are on a private, co-located server. The beautiful thing about Git is that it doesn't require any special software on the server side for hosting--just the regular client. And in particular, Git doesn't require a special daemon service. It doesn't even require a special service for hosting read-only HTTP repositories. The stock Git client can clone repositories over HTTP from static site files. My "official" public Git URLs are just HTTP URLs to a static read-only mirror which is updated from a Git hook when pushing. Those HTTP mirrors required no additional configuration whatsoever; they just sit inside my public_html/ user tree.

The secret to running your own server over the long term (I've been co-locating a server for almost 2 decades) is to keep things simple. It helps that I use OpenBSD, which has always maintained default web and mail servers which, even if disabled by default, are still "secure by default" in the sense of the stock software and configuration being well thought through. (This is especially true since OpenBSD replaced sendmail and Apache with their own software.)

I originally used CVS before switching to Subversion for a few years. But I was never comfortable exposing even a read-only mirror until I switched to Git, as both CVS and Subversion required special server-side software that I was unwilling to run, let alone maintain.

I only started using Github because most other people prefer using Github's interfaces for forking repositories and submitting pull requests. It's a trivial cost on my end (just an additional push), so I don't mind.

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

#240
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Same. For all the times this is recommended, I haven't found a static blog generator that really works well. WordPress is still the easiest and most flexible to get running, but it's a PITA to keep it maintained. After trying Lektor (fine for general use, but hard to theme; no pre-baked templating/theming system at all) and Hugo (tbh I don't remember the exact thing here, but I got really frustrated trying to do some…

We developed Strattic to solve the issue of difficult to maintain and optimize WordPress websites. Strattic publishes WordPress websites as static sites, and the origin site sits behind a login so it's only accessible to you. No server issues etc. Strattic is currently in beta: https://strattic.com.
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