Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
blog.elementary.io
Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
1–10 of 136 posts
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#2I always thought it odd that a team like ElementaryOS with a clearly defined "ethical code and goal" would choose Medium, which is an anti-consumer and anti-privacy company (e.g. try accessing Medium on a mobile phone with a smaller screen).
Good on them for changing.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#3Nice. I did the same exact thing last week with one of my own blogs.
But I was disappointed a little with some quirks with Jekyll. For example, I really needed to list blog posts in categories separately. Turns out there's no built-in way to do that with Jekyll, so I had to find a third-party plug-in to do that. Then there were some changes didn't trigger a rebuild with the local development server running, which I (eventually) realized required stopping the server, deleting the _build directory, and then restarting the server.
These things sound minor in hindsight, but they took a lot of time for me to figure out in the moment. "It's a static site...I picked a static site generator for simplicity!" I kept thinking, annoyed.
I chose Jekyll in particular because it's been around forever and expected it to have little things like this figured out, but was slightly disappointed.
Otherwise it's been good I guess.
For what it's worth, I will occasionally repost articles on my Medium account too, to take advantage of my following there, with the appropriate rel=canonical tag. No reason not to take advantage of it while it lasts.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#4Every time I follow a link to Medium they seem to get more and more pushy. I shy away from clicking on links there anymore, so news like this is welcome.
I must say I don't get what unique value proposition Medium think they have that allows them to treat both publishers and readers like crap.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#5Many articles on Medium are of low-quality. It used to be different. Don't know if this is caused by the monetization efforts.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#6Nice. I did the same exact thing last week with one of my own blogs. But I was disappointed a little with some quirks with Jekyll. For example, I really needed to list blog posts in categories separately. Turns out there's no built-in way to do that with Jekyll, so I had to find a third-party plug-in to do that. Then there were some changes didn't trigger a rebuild with the local development server running, which I (…
I had the same problems with Jekyll and switched to Middleman (also Ruby based). Never looked back.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#7Nice. I did the same exact thing last week with one of my own blogs. But I was disappointed a little with some quirks with Jekyll. For example, I really needed to list blog posts in categories separately. Turns out there's no built-in way to do that with Jekyll, so I had to find a third-party plug-in to do that. Then there were some changes didn't trigger a rebuild with the local development server running, which I (…
I'd definitely recommend checking out Hugo too.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#8Many articles on Medium are of low-quality. It used to be different. Don't know if this is caused by the monetization efforts.
It is the fate of most platforms, initially there are only early adopters that are selected, hand picked or invited, and as the platform progress there is an influx or more mainstream content producer, and the quality tends to be more average.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#9Nice. I did the same exact thing last week with one of my own blogs. But I was disappointed a little with some quirks with Jekyll. For example, I really needed to list blog posts in categories separately. Turns out there's no built-in way to do that with Jekyll, so I had to find a third-party plug-in to do that. Then there were some changes didn't trigger a rebuild with the local development server running, which I (…
Same here. Generating LaTeX statically is a pain in the ass.
Re: Why ElementaryOS Left Medium
#10My problem with Jekyll (or other static generators) is that it's not as straightforward as anything with a web gui, like wordpress or ghost (or medium or tumblr or...). You still need to handle things manually (e.g. the yaml front matter), the preview is not "out of the box", different plugins/extensions may add unpredictable behaviour, you need to setup a build/deploy pipeline, etc. - the experience is just not streamlined.
I think that when you want to write, you shouldn't need to mess up with tech details of your system. It's distracting. Of course I'd like a static website for deploying, but I'd love a web gui which acts as a frontend for such generators. I think that Prose was something similar but I found it buggy/not updated, while another saas I tried(Forestry, I think?) was good but you couldn't customize everything.
Ghost is my ultimate choice until an official, core-developers supported web gui is created for jekyll, hugo, or whatever static generator lies out there.