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Ditching Medium

joshjahans.com

41–50 of 125 posts

Re: Ditching Medium

#41

So we are back to running our own blogs again? What are the alternatives to Medium if you don’t want to self-host? Ghost?

In conjunction with your static site editor of choice, I've found Netlify[0] to be really good. I'm basically just using Webpack atm.

https://www.netlify.com/

Re: Ditching Medium

#42
post #3

Programming blogs are kind of meh to me in general, and will be until the code-display aspects finally get ironed out.

The solution is pretty clear to me but to my knowledge it doesn't exist and the economics of creating it are not that favorable. You need to have a free github/publisher side cache which mirrors the public github repository of the code example. The example should be rendered server side without a javascript library for syntax highlighting / formatting. This way the author, or more likely a reader because the author a…

I think you could achieve the "runnable blog post" component via a site like Glitch.

http://about-glitch.glitch.me/about/features/

https://medium.com/glitch/what-is-glitch-90cd75e40277

Not sure if it is possible to hook it up to a CI or Git hook.

Re: Ditching Medium

#44

I have never understood tech blogs on Medium. Surely if you’re writing about a technical subject, especially programming, you have the skills to setup a quick Jekyll blog? It’s what I did, and I have no idea why I’d hand control of my user experience over to Medium, no idea whatsoever.

Not for technical reasons, for distribution. A lot more people subscribe to Medium publications for instance than my personal blog.

Re: Ditching Medium

#45
> Medium would be charging people to read content that I am putting out for free.

Agree that this ^ is non-ideal.

But was Medium ever the go-to platform for programming blogs?

They don't really have much feature-wise catering towards technical posts e.g., nice syntax highlighting or code embedding, runnable snippets, limited embedding support, minimal analytics offering.

Re: Ditching Medium

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medium is a Ghetto. Who wants to be seen along with thinly sliced salami articles that almost have something to say, desperate content marketers who are writing articles like "Does your API Need a Content Marketing Strategy?" and who are amazed that they got 35 people to view their steaming Turd Emoji? Not me.

It definitely feels like the bloggers on Medium are considerably more self-indulgent and considerably less intelligent.

I think it went through a similar transition as Quora where it was known as a place for smart people to blog, and as it grew it then attracted a bunch of users who wanted to be seen as smart

Re: Ditching Medium

#49

So we are back to running our own blogs again? What are the alternatives to Medium if you don’t want to self-host? Ghost?

FWIW you can trivially self-host Ghost these days with an official one-click droplet on DigitalOcean. https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/ghost/ https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/one-clicks/ghost/

There are a million security implications involved with this. I don't recommend it unless you're going to stay on top of keeping your system up to date.

Re: Ditching Medium

#50
Not to mention that it drives your users away and reduces your conversion rate by showing them a big full-screen banner in front of your posts every single time they visit the site unless they sign up for Medium themselves. Who wants to have to log in just to read some blogs?

And then there's the lack of RSS feed, so I have to actually visit each individual blog to see if there are updates instead of having them dropped nicely in my inbox with the rest of my morning read.

Medium is a garbage place for readers and content producers: please stay away from it.

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