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Ditching Medium

joshjahans.com

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Re: Ditching Medium

#111

Post by SamWhited »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #66
SamWhited wrote: post #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 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.

The only way things change is if people don't use it; even just re-blogging verifies and supports their bad behavior.

Re: Ditching Medium

#112

Post by dijital »

jlebar wrote: post #81
tehjoker wrote: post #67

Hosting 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…

I host my (static site, very-low-traffic) blog with nearlyfreespeech.net for less than $10/yr. My hosting costs are less than domain-registration costs. Highly recommended, I've had zero problems with them.

Static hosting via AWS S3 (or Azure/GCP equivalent) with a free Cloudflare account in front it might be even cheaper!

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosti...

Re: Ditching Medium

#114

Post by doki_pen »

tehjoker wrote: post #67

Hosting 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…

I totally agree. The internet is where people live now and there is no "commons", no "public square". This is where people get so irritated with private companies that own all the space and decide how we interact. The internet is a libertarian dystopia. Things like "free speech" would apply on public social media platforms. If this idea were ever to come to fruition it would probably need to start at the local scale and focus on local political issues.

Re: Ditching Medium

#115

Post by johnonolan »

cryptos wrote: post #105
StavrosK wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I evaluated Hugo and went with Lektor for the reasons you mention. I haven't regretted it, Lektor is much more sane.

While Lektor doesn't look bad, I doubt it would be attractive for non-technical persons. I'm thinking of something more like Ghost, WordPress (with less features), but with static files as output.

This is possible with Ghost :) it functions as a headless CMS and can be used with essentially any static site generator which can pull content from an API, eg. Gatsby -- https://docs.ghost.org/api/gatsby/

We'll be sharing more about this on Weds in a bigger blog post - it's a fairly recent addition

Re: Ditching Medium

#116

Post by Liriel »

sergiotapia wrote: post #55
azhenley wrote: post #23

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?

I've moved to: https://dev.to Solid platform, discoverability baked in, great writing tools. They do need to polish their UX though as I wrote a lengthy article for about an hour and then clicked on "Write a Post" instead of Save to publish. This wiped my editor clean with no way to recover what was lost. Horrible experience there. They should at least autosave for you on every keystroke. No reason not to.

Make sure to check out https://hashnode.com too :)

Re: Ditching Medium

#118

Post by mnmlsm »

Liriel wrote: post #116
sergiotapia wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've moved to: https://dev.to Solid platform, discoverability baked in, great writing tools. They do need to polish their UX though as I wrote a lengthy article for about an hour and then clicked on "Write a Post" instead of Save to publish. This wiped my editor clean with no way to recover what was lost. Horrible experience there. They should at least autosave for you on every keystroke. No reason not to.

Make sure to check out https://hashnode.com too :)

I can also recommend Hashnode. It also has a new autosave for post drafts: https://hashnode.com/post/writing-announcing-drafts-feature-...

Re: Ditching Medium

#119

Post by mnmlsm »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #69
SoulMan wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am on blogger. But what I don't like about it is 1. It only uses a narrow column for content. 2. No code highlighting or snippets embedding support

There are multiple layouts, all further customizable. If you can edit HTML, you have access to the code. If you can't, there are myriad user-friendly options for making the interface do what you want. I actually help people with that for pay if you want assistance. The code snippets are a real issue. I'm not sure how much code you could even show because I don't show code snippets on any of my blogs. Maybe screenshot…

Both are OK, but I like https://hashnode.com/ better - it's a blogging community for developers and you can use Markdown which is much simpler.
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