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?
Why not WordPress? You can use their host, or self-host.
Ditching Medium
71–80 of 125 posts
Re: Ditching Medium
#72Hosting blogs is cheap and everyone should be able to have one. However, if we leave it to the corporate sector, they'll either need a subscription or ads, neither of which are conducive to public discussion. Since serving blogs is so cheap, why doesn't the government offer a free service where you can host a text website? Kind of like a university webpage for all students, but for everyone? You would then have a fin…
> why doesn't the government offer a free service where you can host a text website
It's debatable whether this is the sort of thing governments exist to do.
Re: Ditching Medium
#73Hosting blogs is cheap and everyone should be able to have one. However, if we leave it to the corporate sector, they'll either need a subscription or ads, neither of which are conducive to public discussion. Since serving blogs is so cheap, why doesn't the government offer a free service where you can host a text website? Kind of like a university webpage for all students, but for everyone? You would then have a fin…
> why doesn't the government offer a free service where you can host a text website It's debatable whether this is the sort of thing governments exist to do.
That's not an argument that it won't work fwiw.
Re: Ditching Medium
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The security implications are no different than those for hosting any other web application which most developers are already comfortable doing.
Re: Ditching Medium
#75Not 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 drop…
If you reblog your content on a Medium blog to take advantage of their user base it can be a great tool. Don't use it for a primary blog.
Doesn’t that destroy your SEO? I was warned 6+ years ago never to do that, but can’t recall the technical reason.
Re: Ditching Medium
#76Are there any good, free hosted options for blogs about programming?
Re: Ditching Medium
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
Perhaps if you're doing this type of work frequently, but if you're just a regular person who wants a blog it's not trivial nor advisable. Configuring your DO instance can be a pain and you have to manually keep Ghost up to date by SSHing in. Definitely not set and forget.
The author's post seemed to target a developer blogger audience as opposed to regular people.
With this particular image, there's virtually no DO configuration (just standard size / region settings which have smart defaults IIRC). You do have to SSH in, but the new Ghost 2.0 CLI handles updating Ghost much more smoothly than in the past. I've been happy with it personally.
Re: Ditching Medium
#78Not 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 drop…
Medium does have RSS feeds: " rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/feed/
Re: Ditching Medium
#79Are there any good, free hosted options for blogs about programming?
dev.to
Re: Ditching Medium
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you reblog your content on a Medium blog to take advantage of their user base it can be a great tool. Don't use it for a primary blog.
Doesn’t that destroy your SEO? I was warned 6+ years ago never to do that, but can’t recall the technical reason.
Go back far enough and I remember you would Google a key phrase, and see the first full ten pages being the exact same article, as accordance with some SEO gaming scheme.
Google quite reasonably now sees duplicate identical content as an issue, you can use the "canonical" HTML tag can be used to help it see the "real" link where several exist.
I don't know what'll happen when there are only two copies of your page, but I'd hazard a guess it'll preference medium's domain over your own in most cases.