No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
This article is correctly using a rhetorical question for discussion. (The answer to the headline is "maybe")
Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?
11–20 of 199 posts
Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?
#12Getting hosted by someone else is incredibly convenient. They take care of all the work of maintenance, security, reliability, and even give you tools to increase your visibility on the web and design your blog. IMHO only hobbyists or people with a very good reason should self-host. If you don't like one company's terms, look into the many other blog providers out there.
Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?
#13My problem with Medium is that it lends this amazing aura of credibility to everything that is published on it. I think they've hit on the design equivalent of the brown note (of South Park fame) which makes readers mentally incontinent vis-a-vis the credibility of the source of the actual text... Or maybe it's just me?
I think it might be you. I treat it like I would Wordpress.com
This calls for an experiment
Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?
#14I self-host using a static site generator. I've found it to be very nice in the sense that it just takes pennies for the site to run. I think a lot of folks are still running WordPress of some kind on their own Dreamhost, etc, accounts which feels like self-hosting to me.
Static site generators are not a good answer for non-engineers, especially if customizations are necessary. I had self-hosted WordPress on Dreamhost until I got kicked off due to a viral post and my site deleted. Recovering my posts and learning how to use Jekyll/GitHub Pages in less than 24 hours was fun.
They deleted your site??? That's pretty extraordinary. Don't they normally just suspend the account, put up a static page indicating so and then ask you to pay some more?
Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?
#15My problem with Medium is that it lends this amazing aura of credibility to everything that is published on it. I think they've hit on the design equivalent of the brown note (of South Park fame) which makes readers mentally incontinent vis-a-vis the credibility of the source of the actual text... Or maybe it's just me?
Not just you. Before I found out what Medium was, I thought it was some new journalism franchise with a lot of amateur contributors.
(I guess in a weird way that's what blogging is?)
Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?
#16yes - why self host when I can host my blog at github using jekyll in < 10 minutes ?
Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?
#17Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?
#18I use and highly recommend hexo.io with it's S3 deployment plugin. It's as good as Jekyll but easier to modify and theme if you come from a web dev background as it's written in NodeJS rather than Ruby.
> It's as good as Jekyll but easier to modify and theme if you could from a web dev background as it's written in NodeJS rather than Ruby.
Er, are you implying that Ruby is not a language for people with a web development background?
Regardless, most of Jekyll tweaking is done with Liquid templates, which are mostly agnostic. (You do use Ruby for plugins, yes, but they are not super important.)
Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?
#19My problem with Medium is that it lends this amazing aura of credibility to everything that is published on it. I think they've hit on the design equivalent of the brown note (of South Park fame) which makes readers mentally incontinent vis-a-vis the credibility of the source of the actual text... Or maybe it's just me?
I changed my opinion when I checked out their homepage, usually if you go from HN or reddit it's a higher quality post but when you go from the homepage you can get a glimpse of the average post. It just lost that kind of credibility feeling for me.
Re: Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?
#20I own a self-hosted blog and am actually in the process of deciding whether to transfer over to medium. To be honest I'm pretty much decided that I will, because it's just easier, not to mention I can save myself some hosting fees.
The key questions of the debate on the cons side of switching, assuming you're blogging for fun and not thinking particularly about advertising or massively customised SEO strategies, seem to be:
1. do I own my content 2. will my content be accessible forever
As this post highlights, the answer to (1) on medium is YES. So, no problems.
The answer to (2) is also, for all practical purposes, YES, but you shouldn't depend on it.
But is this really such an issue anyway? I certainly assume that the vast majority back up their photographs, just by nature, and how difficult is it to back up the plaintext of your blog pieces too? If you have backups, and the answer to (1) is yes, then really, it starts to look like an easy decision.