Having just posted a programming related article there last night I think it’s a poor choice for technical subjects too. We need a Medium for technical people. Maybe not quite Observable (Mike Bostock’s thing) but with more tools than Medium.
Medium is a poor choice for blogging
201–210 of 396 posts
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this a thousand times. One example, Dan Luu [1] gets this absolutely right . His blog would probably look similar on Lynx, or any text-only browser, yet is better than 99.99% of stuff "out there". [1] https://danluu.com/
On my regular browser size this looks something like this [1], which is borderline unreadable due to the width alone. Sure I can resize the browser at least, but even then I am finding the posts hard to read due to the font-size, letter spacing and line-height. The browser default styles did work perfectly in the 90's, but they didn't evolve when the devices use to browse the pages did. And yes, you can always use Ly…
> On my regular browser size this looks something like this [1], which is borderline unreadable due to the width alone.
Just resize your browser window: it's not the site's job to guess how you want content displayed.
I loved browsing the web in the 90s: I had a half-width browser window on one side of my screen, an editor window in the upper quadrant of the other side and a console window the the lower quadrant. It was great! Then suddenly every website decided that I must have a full-width browser window, and was ludicrously narrow with a half-width browser. And they all stopped using and started abusing CSS. And then they all started using & abusing (but I repeat myself) JavaScript.
All I really want from the Web in 2018 is the experience I had in the 90s, and I can't get it any longer.
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get yourself in control of your stuff. But zero ways to get people to read it. I only read his post because it's on HN. And I read Medium stuff regularly on Medium. The chances of most people discovering some random blog? Not so much. Whereas Medium has concentrated eyeballs and knows their preferences to serve them stuff that's close to their tastes...
If you write about tech, you can cross-post your article on dev.to and set a canonical link for SEO. I don't know if Medium offers this kind of option. So you have people reading your content while you keep your personal blog.
Medium has this option as well.
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
On my regular browser size this looks something like this [1], which is borderline unreadable due to the width alone. Sure I can resize the browser at least, but even then I am finding the posts hard to read due to the font-size, letter spacing and line-height. The browser default styles did work perfectly in the 90's, but they didn't evolve when the devices use to browse the pages did. And yes, you can always use Ly…
Here's the thing: your browser has a handy tool to increase/decrease font size. Usually it will also scale the images in sensible ways. And it's available via keyboard shortcuts, so it's easy to zoom in/out. Also this format works great with the browser's "Reader" function.
> Here's the thing: your browser has a handy tool to increase/decrease font size.
Here's the thing: I don't want the font or the images to be bigger, I want columns to not be this absurdly long. The only way for the user to achieve it is to resize the browser window.
There is a "max-width" CSS property for that. No framework or JS required, just a modicum of care.
> Also this format works great with the browser's "Reader" function.
It still would using max-width.
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#205It's funny, because some years ago when Medium blogs were starting to be posted left and right, people were praising the interface, and nobody listened to the few who objected. Now, we need all kinds of tricks, add-ons and blocks to just read five-minute posts during our commute. It's 2018, and there are a gazillion ways to get yourself in control of your stuff. The next free framework that comes, which promises a cl…
FYI: Instead of the "old / out-dated" Jekyll Now setup by Barry Clark (before packaged themes arrived on GitHub Pages) - you can use the Minima theme (default) and get started in 60 seconds. See Hello, Minima! Theme - Get Started in 60 Seconds @ https://github.com/henrythemes/hello-minima-theme as a ready-to-fork (live) example.
PS: For more ready-to-fork (open source) themes for GitHub pages, see the Dr Jekyll Themes directory / listing (200+ and counting) @ http://drjekyllthemes.github.io
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know people keep saying this, but resizing the browser is not really a viable solution with today's messed up web. Sure, I can resize the browser for this blog using full width lines but then I have to resize my browser again for another website because the other website chooses to waste half of the horizontal real estate with meaningless stuff. As a user, I can't keep resizing the browser for every site I visit.
Eh. I have a 40in monitor, a 13in monitor, and a 7in monitor. It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page. On the 40in screen it would be asinine for me to maximise it, for example. It's completely unsurprising to me that I can resize the window into a state where the website becomes silly. I just don't do that. Resizing a window is trivial, it's not that you can't, it's that…
> It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design
This concept is popular for more than 10 years now. Many websites do it with something as simple as
article { max-width: 60em }
Take Twitter for web. Reduce the browser to something like 60% or 70% of the screen width. The
...
elements containing the tweets are chopped off on the right side. It disrupts my reading experience due to minor resizing. This is most of the web today.> Resizing a window is trivial, it's not that you can't, it's that you won't.
That's true. I don't want to be resizing my browser up and down for every good and bad website.
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#207Could be a good time to mention Plume [1], a Medium clone written in Rust that uses the fediverse for displaying blog posts across different instances.
Still very much a work in progress – but one can already publish articles, comment them, and follow people using RSS or a Mastodon account (because ActivityPub rocks).
Not ready ret, but quite promising.
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
On my regular browser size this looks something like this [1], which is borderline unreadable due to the width alone. Sure I can resize the browser at least, but even then I am finding the posts hard to read due to the font-size, letter spacing and line-height. The browser default styles did work perfectly in the 90's, but they didn't evolve when the devices use to browse the pages did. And yes, you can always use Ly…
Here's the thing: your browser has a handy tool to increase/decrease font size. Usually it will also scale the images in sensible ways. And it's available via keyboard shortcuts, so it's easy to zoom in/out. Also this format works great with the browser's "Reader" function.
Here's the thing: It's not better zoomed in. Insanely huge lettering isn't any better just because it's suddenly 85 characters wide on your screen, or whatever the goal these days is.
At a certain point you have to recognize that even little CSS (max-width, font-size) can actually be a good thing, and when a site lacks this it doesn't make it somehow inherently better, it just makes it harder to read and I am nearly as inclined to simply hit the back button as I am on Medium articles. It's two ends to a horseshoe. The best place to be is somewhere closer to the middle.
Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know people keep saying this, but resizing the browser is not really a viable solution with today's messed up web. Sure, I can resize the browser for this blog using full width lines but then I have to resize my browser again for another website because the other website chooses to waste half of the horizontal real estate with meaningless stuff. As a user, I can't keep resizing the browser for every site I visit.
Eh. I have a 40in monitor, a 13in monitor, and a 7in monitor. It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page. On the 40in screen it would be asinine for me to maximise it, for example. It's completely unsurprising to me that I can resize the window into a state where the website becomes silly. I just don't do that. Resizing a window is trivial, it's not that you can't, it's that…
It's impossible for a site developer to know how much space to allocate to their page.
max-width: a bunch of ems;Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging
#210Sometimes I read articles like this and think I'm past it. It's like the whole web has turned in to this pool of mud and no-one realises what it was like before. A blog is a text file on a screen. There's really no need to do it on a proprietary system, you can literally upload a text file to your own host, but if you can't be bothered, somewhere like GitHub Pages. You want an image? Here's a tag: If the idea is that…
> It's like the whole web has turned in to this pool of mud and no-one realises what it was like before. Every website is trying to reinvent the wheel. Foolish! I hate the grid/huge amount of white space layout that is so pervasive now. Websites that have their information in a nice and clean, condensed list view are unicorns now. Condensed lists are literally the best layout to convey information in a given space, t…
> except they give you much more information at a time without having to endlessly scroll.
I think getting people to scroll isn't an accident, they want you to have to scroll.
Scrolling a website makes you physically interact with it, and I bet that has some psychological effects that work out in favour of the content creators.
Whenever I am in a place where you have to wait a lot, like at a bus station, nearly everyone is swiping at their phone.
They all look like crack addicts scratching for rocks in an alleyway.