Medium is a poor choice for blogging

Joel Spolsky (if you don’t know him, he was one of the first “Celebrity Bloggers” in tech culture) gave me a piece of advice more than a decade ago: Own your own domain and publish under it, that way you always control your content and the links to your content.

If my blog was raganwald.githubpages.com, GitHub could theoretically decide that githubpages needed to be deeply integrated with Windows or some other foolishness, and I’d be screwed.

But since my blog appears to the world as raganwald.com, I can leave GitHub Pages whenever I like, and all the links will continue to work. It's about long-term control, and for that you need:

1. Control your content, ideally with a copy of the source on your own devices at all time, in an open format with an ecosystem of tooling, and;

2. Control your domain name.

Wordpress. I prefer older technology for things that have been long solved already

Rebuilding my blog from scratch at the moment (using my own theme), it's not so bad dealing with PHP and wordpress.

I really dislike not fully owning my content, especially with medium or middle-ware like disqus which is pretty much required with jekyll. Medium has really poor syntax color formatting as well.

Security is not really a big issue for me, especially if you pick a good hosting provider, and follow basic 101 practices.

I'll still use medium to link back to my blog though (not really doing it at the moment though).

This article seems to miss the point of medium entirely. He fails to mention that you can be paid for content you create on medium, and content consumers don't have to sell their eyes to advertisers. Yes, they have to be pushy so they can acquire that critical base of paid users, but I'll take that any day over traditional advertisers.

Now, if you aren't interested in being paid for the content you create, then medium's goals might not be aligned with yours, so another self hosted platform may be better.

> it’s bad. Bad. Really bad. It’s not good, for any meaning of good you can imagine. There’s no person on Earth who could honestly call it at even partially good. Banners all over the place. Aggressive tracking and profiling.

Go poll 50 free users on the reading experience of Medium. Obviously this is anecdotal but almost everyone I speak to loves reading on medium. Compared to other ad-infested or high paywall websites, medium provides a incredible reading experience for it's goals as a for profit platform.

Reach and engagement are problems these days. Many social platforms promote things they can inject ads on. E.g. a Facebook post will get a wider audience than simply posting a link to your FB feed. Same on linkedin. Same on twitter. They are optimized for keeping traffic inside their platform. They'll run your content but not necessarily bubble it up in other people's feeds.

Medium is not a great platform for distribution compared to that (poor reach and it never really emerged as a destination) but not worse than other external/self hosted blogs. A good strategy if you are hungry for clicks is to target all of them with content appropriate to the platform and a link to your blog for reading more. By appropriate I mean optimized for the attention span of the reader. So short tweet on twitter, executive summary on Linkedin for those poor people with essentially no attention spans and an aunty friendly version for Facebook. Reddit post and HN link if you feel brave ;-). I've also been targeting dev.to.

I recently started a blog built with Hugo and published using Netlify by way of a private git repo on Gitlab.com.

I would have used Gitlab pages but there is not support for automated SSL certs for custom domains. You have to upload your own manually which doesn't play nice with letsencrypt's 90-day expiry.