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Medium is a poor choice for blogging

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Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#311

Post by movedx »

alanh wrote: post #182
tpaschalis wrote: post #83

Earlier 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/

He took it way too far. Long lines are unreadable and 50 more bytes of CSS would fix it. I humbly submit my own blog as being pretty darn readable without bloat. It’s responsive and simple. https://alanhogan.com Edit: Here’s a relevant article: The problem with new blogging platforms https://alanhogan.com/the-problem-with-new-blog-platforms

I can't use the Reader Mode in Chrome or Safari on your website? If you added that in, I would agree with you. Otherwise, it's an "OK" experience.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#313

Post by movedx »

mcbits wrote: post #196
shadowfacts wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dan Luu's blog is almost there, but personally I'd prefer if there was just a tiny bit of CSS that capped the width of the text. With full width paragraphs, it's not the most pleasant to read.

Stylus (not Stylish) can make sites like this readable enough if you visit them often enough to be worth a couple minutes to fix them. Here's a tiny bit of CSS: body { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.45; background-color: #ededed; margin: auto; padding: 0.5rem; max-width: 80ch; } .pd { padding-bottom: initial; } One point in favor of ultra-minimalism is that it's easier to add a few styles t…

This is an interesting point, actually.

Should publication platforms be giving us two choices: their design and implementation; or raw text (HTML) we can style ourselves?

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#314

Post by jsutton »

tpaschalis wrote: post #83
esotericn wrote: post #61

Sometimes 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…

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/

Oh come on, that is not easy to read. There's no reason to go back to the 1990s, minimal styling and good typography with reasonable margins and spacing are absolutely worth it for readability.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#315

Post by xena »

esotericn wrote: post #61

Sometimes 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…

I tried to do it right: https://christine.website/blog

The only javascript on any page is for the service worker that allows offline loading of pages.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#316

Post by int_19h »

alanh wrote: post #182
tpaschalis wrote: post #83

Earlier 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/

He took it way too far. Long lines are unreadable and 50 more bytes of CSS would fix it. I humbly submit my own blog as being pretty darn readable without bloat. It’s responsive and simple. https://alanhogan.com Edit: Here’s a relevant article: The problem with new blogging platforms https://alanhogan.com/the-problem-with-new-blog-platforms

The right place to fix the long line issue is on the browser side, with user in control of what makes the line "long" - since it's inherently a subjective metric.

If most websites were like this one, I could write a simple one-page CSS that formatted them the way I want - including fonts, colors, lines etc. As originally intended by this whole HTML thing.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#317

Post by PavlovsCat »

joeax wrote: post #308
PavlovsCat wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Thanks! This is what I had in mind.

You're welcome :) These might also be of interest:

https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted

https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#318

Post by int_19h »

arkitaip wrote: post #147
tpaschalis wrote: post #83

Earlier 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/

The total lack of styling makes it almost unreadable. Even if you resize the window to get a sane page width the lack of margins makes it uncomfortable to read.

The question you should be asking is, why is the default CSS in your browser making unstyled websites uncomfortable to read? The browser could provide sane defaults for margins etc. It just chooses not to - probably because everything it renders is going to be styled anyway, so why bother?

Ironically, the "reading mode" thing that is becoming popular is essentially that - stripping the page of most of its custom styling, and then applying some sensible default style. It's like we went full circle, all the way back to pre-CSS times.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#319

Post by LinuxBender »

I am not into blogging. If I were, I would just you a very lightweight html and css on a tiny VM, precompress it and serve it from the ram disk. No CDN. No CMS. Just good ol' vim. Maybe I would get fancy by having a header and footer that shows up on each page. There would be no limit to how many times people could view it for free.

If I wanted to let friends add their blogs or comments, I would enable a chroot sftp and link to a root page for them. I've taught teenagers to use sftp, so it can't be that difficult.

In summary, I suppose I agree that any heavy framework on some domain you do not own is less than ideal. If self hosting were not an option for whatever reason, I might use neocities [1] for nostalgic reasons. That would also be free to view for everyone.

[1] - https://neocities.org/

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#320

Post by _threads »

reaperducer wrote: post #187
nindwen wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reader mode is definitely a very important part of the modern web experience. A rather sad truth. I recently also found a Firefox extension [1] I'd been looking for a some time: a way to automatically enter reader mode on some URLs, such as medium.com. This makes browsing Medium much nicer. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...

a way to automatically enter reader mode on some URLs, such as medium.com Safari has this built-in. Enter reader mode on a web page, then right-click on the reader icon and you can set every page in the domain to automatically display in reader mode. Safari isn't usually the first with new features, so it might be available in other browsers, as well.

Damn’ thanks ! Awesome ! I just discovered it’s also working on iOS with a long press on the reader button
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