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Medium is a poor choice for blogging

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361–370 of 396 posts

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and making sure that I matched popular writing styles Maybe this is the problem. I'm sure as a professional writer you need to keep up with reader interests (rather than setting up to do the blog equivalent of Finnegan's Wake ), but you don't want to be too interchangeable either. It's like you had to decide each month from each cake you want to eat (there's an infinite row of cakes) and you vie for the huge ones -…

+1 for the apt cake analogy

[deleted]

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#362
I wrote about why you should not move to medium sometime back citing the example of Basecamp. https://medium.com/@adarsh_thampy/basecamp-moved-their-blog-...

And basecamp is moving away from Medium.

The problem with Medium is that the inbuilt audience will go away soon. Browse their home page, and now most of the articles are premium ones.

This is very similar to Facebook. When pages started, they were great. But as Facebook wanted to make money, they began restricting reach.

Clearly, that's where Medium will head towards.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah ok. Fair enough. I don't think medium works for that.

You don't think Medium is a good place to publish to reach people on Medium? What site would you recommend instead?

I don't know. But medium do a terrible job at sharing their own content between users.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a HN CSS problem, not a problem of code formatting. They should fix it. Meanwhile, on mobile one can use one of the 10s of HN client apps.

The point of the “code” formatting is so that the text doesn’t wrap.

That doesn't mean the code styled div should also not be scrollable in mobile devices or be beyond the edge.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#366
post #182

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

If you want feedback, the header is distracting and takes focus from the content.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#367
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 every…

> They all look like crack addicts scratching for rocks in an alleyway.

Here's a relevant comic:

https://zenpencils.com/comic/129-marc-maron-the-social-media...

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#368

It'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…

Oh, and since everybody seems to post their personal blogs for critique, shameless plug in adding a link to my own, which I think gets the minimalism aesthetic sooomewhat right. It still needs some more slimming down, and small aesthetic changes would be welcome, but here it goes. [1] https://tpaschalis.github.io/

Love your post about what good software is.

Currently trawling your archive

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately you got downvoted because HN is obsessed with static site generators. Meanwhile, Wordpress offers a superior writing and reading experience which you, the owner, totally control.

Wordpress seems to be objectively bloated and messy in terms of the website code that is generated. You can run wordpress blogs through a website speed analyzer and compare it with a static gen site and see this. The "hate" isn't based solely on being hip.

But this just isn't true.

If you install wordpress, and then grab a bunch of plugins and themes and install them without taking any care, it won't bundle and minify your javascript. It's no different to having a static website and grabbing a load of jquery plugins and throwing them onto a page.

But if you use some techniques such as building your theme and plugins using gulp or similar, you can have your wordpress site outputting bundled and minified javascript.

There are also caching techniques that can be used at the webserver level, just like any other website.

Re: Medium is a poor choice for blogging

#370

So why the hell did you use it to write this article, then? I wrote a tool which converts your Medium blog into a Jekyll blog, for publishers hoping to migrate: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify

That tool looks interesting, how does it get the data? Does it scrap a user profile? Can it deal with users having a large number of posts (I think the rss and json API only return a limited number of posts).
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