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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

#241

Post by illuminea »

Matt3o12_ wrote: post #122
cupcakestand wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

That's why we developed Strattic: it allows users to enjoy the flexibility and power of WordPress without the need to maintain and secure servers. Strattic publishes the site as static and serverless, and the origin site is only available to the site owner. It's like a static site generator, but for WordPress. Strattic is currently in beta: https://strattic.com.

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

#242

Post by illuminea »

From a branding and long-term point of view, it's really important to "own" your content by hosting it on your own domain and even server space. The advantage of a platform like Medium is that it can increase the reach of your content, but it's too risky to go all in with them since who knows how long they'll be around, or what limitations they might add down the line.

But there's a way to have your cake and eat it too: you can publish first on your self-hosted WordPress site, and then republish automatically on Medium with a canonical tag pointing back to your WordPress site. This means you get the SEO and control benefits of WP, and the reach benefits of Medium.

I wrote a guide on how to make this magic happen: https://illuminea.com/ultimate-guide-to-wordpress-medium/. Of course this post is also reposted on Medium with the canonical tag :) https://medium.com/@miriamschwab/6425c2d5e5c4

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

#243

Post by soulwatcher »

ValentineC wrote: post #236
soulwatcher wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A website for a car rental organization.

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

#244

Post by tuxracer »

jccalhoun wrote: post #169
tuxracer wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NoScript is also integrated into https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.brow... This uses Chrome so there's likely higher compatibility with mobile sites

script blocking may be built in but I don't think noscript is.

Other than name/logo what's the difference? Brave allows you to block all scripts by default and only whitelist specific sites.

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

#245

Post by movedx »

HappyTypist wrote: post #185
movedx wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You are off by four orders of magnitudes DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode: $0.02 per GB over your transfer limit OVH $9/month VPS: 100mbps unlimited bandwidth, and yes, OVH doesn't care if you have 7x24 100% utilisation on your 100 mbps. Let's say you have a 100MB video that gets 20,000 views, and half of the viewers end up streaming the full video. BW incurred: 1 TB. Cost to you: $20

Have you ever produced videos for mass consumption? I have. They don't weigh in at 100mb. Try 500mb. And the aim with sharing videos is to get as much global reach and viewership as possible -- 20,000 views? What? I want hundreds of thousands of views otherwise what's the point in putting the effort in?

If I can produce a blog post in three days that gets 100,000 hits and allows me to provide affiliate links, multiple, constantly visible adverts, and so on, all for $5/month, why would I spend five days writing scripts, filming video, doing post production, and uploading the video for potentially less impact at 10x the cost?

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

#246

Post by movedx »

computerex wrote: post #218
movedx wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nice, good to know. I'll use Travis in the future for some side projects. But for my site/blog I think I'll stick to using my current droplet because I currently have no build time delay, and hugo is very fast. As soon as the push to github is complete, I just refresh my browser and the changes are in. With Travis it appears all open source projects share the same build queue so it can take minutes for the changes to…

That's fair enough.

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

#247

Post by jjeaff »

DamonHD wrote: post #121
jjeaff wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think I would trust your data point of 1. Google has officially announced that it will factor in and many other sites with many data points have confirmed the effect.

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-s...

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

#248

Post by homakov »

pmontra wrote: post #73

About the dickbars: 1) I uBlock them on my phone and tablet. Unfortunately there are plenty of random sites on Medium with their own domain. I don't follow any of them and get there from HN or similar sites. Blocking all of them doesn't make sense because I'll probably never get back to that domain. I agree with the author, the button in the middle of the page really sucks. 2) On desktop, the button and the dickbar n…

>because obviously email is safer and more convenient than a password stored in a password manager (/sarcasm).

no reason for sarcasm, it actually is safer. But UX is still bad, and emails are unreliable - true.

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

#249

Post by jccalhoun »

tuxracer wrote: post #244
jccalhoun wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

script blocking may be built in but I don't think noscript is.

Other than name/logo what's the difference? Brave allows you to block all scripts by default and only whitelist specific sites.

Noscript does more than just turn javascript on and off. I recall the creator of noscript writing a post a few years ago saying that the plugin model of chrome didn't allow for all the things noscript does. That may have changed since and umatrix may be able to do things that the noscript guy said couldn't be done but I don't know

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

#250

Post by tuxracer »

jccalhoun wrote: post #249
tuxracer wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than name/logo what's the difference? Brave allows you to block all scripts by default and only whitelist specific sites.

Noscript does more than just turn javascript on and off. I recall the creator of noscript writing a post a few years ago saying that the plugin model of chrome didn't allow for all the things noscript does. That may have changed since and umatrix may be able to do things that the noscript guy said couldn't be done but I don't know

Brave's features are not an extension. It's is a fork of Chromium. Any mechanism they include in their build has none of the limitations extensions have and they're not extensions at all.
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