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Medium is not the home for your ideas

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Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#111

Post by _mlxl »

joelrunyon wrote: post #16

I've been yelling about this for years, but please start & own your own blog. Use webflow, ghost or whatever you like, but wordpress is good enough for most people. HN audience can likely handle their own, but if ease-of-setup is an issue - I created StartABlog.com to help people do this (and we'll actually set up your site for you for free - https://startablog.com/start ). Own your platform. Own your content. Own yo…

One thing you really miss when leaving Medium is the audience. It is easy for people search Medium for a topic they are interested in and find it within the first couple of articles.

If you are trusting Google to be your entry point for traffic you have to play all kinds of gross games with your content for SEO purpose and if you are adding value to an already well explored topic there will be someone out there trouncing you in SEO.

Medium was initially brilliant because it solved this by aggregating content in a slick website, with great search, and it still does a decent job of showing you new content based on your interests. I think this is a part of why its so frustrating. When I go on the home page I see a bunch of articles I would want to read, go to click them and get paywalled.

But then the money men came. I'm not convinced there is anything out there like Medium in terms of ease-of-use, ability to get your content in front of others, good at surfacing new content you would want to read and also Medium pay content authors really really well.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#113

Post by saagarjha »

thereyougo wrote: post #29

People say that they loved medium in the past because of their custom domains. I think that they also had issues back then. If your company is still running on Medium you're very limited with customizing your blog. You can't add any CTA button, popup window, widget, or anything that can help you to justify your blog exsistance. If 1000 people get into your blog post, only around 30 will hit your homepage. Compare it…

> You can't add any CTA button, popup window, widget, or anything that can help you to justify your blog exsistance.

FWIW, I utterly abhor these when reading blogs. Consider “goodwill” as being an abstract benefit of your blog existing.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#114

Post by abdullahkhalids »

axegon_ wrote: post #78
jiggawatts wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the best static site generator that meets the following requirements: a) Doesn't use node.js. b) Has built-in syntax highlighting for C#, SQL, PowerShell and Rust at a minimum. c) Is also good at "photo journals" or galleries. I played around with Hugo, but the themes were ugly and it was very weak at managing pictures associated with an entry instead of the entire site.

Some time ago I asked myself the same question. Ideally I wanted not so much a generator but rather something that is completely self-contained. Essentially add a markdown or html file, commit and move on. Surprisingly enough I couldn't find anything that does that so I ended up building one myself. Doesn't support syntax highlighting at the moment but I've considered looking into it. Perhaps I should open source it…

Pelican [1] works this way, and I love it for my blog/website.

I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook.

[1] https://blog.getpelican.com/

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#115

Post by saagarjha »

The button to tweet about free speech on the web is a bit ironic ;) But yes, stay off of Medium. And I’m not just saying it, I walk the talk myself for my blog: it’s really not that hard and I can confirm that it “works”, at least for my definition of “works” (read: minimal fees–just a domain registration–per year, highly flexible but not a massive pain to use, attracts readers of some sort…)

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#116

Post by imtringued »

hamandcheese wrote: post #87
jiggawatts wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the best static site generator that meets the following requirements: a) Doesn't use node.js. b) Has built-in syntax highlighting for C#, SQL, PowerShell and Rust at a minimum. c) Is also good at "photo journals" or galleries. I played around with Hugo, but the themes were ugly and it was very weak at managing pictures associated with an entry instead of the entire site.

a) seems like a very arbitrary restriction

From my point of view it is a very informed decision.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#119

Post by jcims »

vishnu_ks wrote: post #44

Folks looking for a Medium alternative, please checkout https://diff.blog . It's an aggregator of developer and engineering blogs I built an year back. It has been growing steadily since. The reason why I built this was to solve the problem of disoveralibilty of self hosted blogs. It's hard for bloggers with self hosted blogs to reach a big audience. So a lot of them end up moving to a platform like Medium which give…

This is awesome!!!

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#120

Post by axegon_ »

cxr wrote: post #97
axegon_ wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some time ago I asked myself the same question. Ideally I wanted not so much a generator but rather something that is completely self-contained. Essentially add a markdown or html file, commit and move on. Surprisingly enough I couldn't find anything that does that so I ended up building one myself. Doesn't support syntax highlighting at the moment but I've considered looking into it. Perhaps I should open source it…

> Ideally I wanted not so much a generator but rather something that is completely self-contained. Essentially add a markdown or html file, commit and move on. Could you explain what you mean here?

As I said, make it fully self-contained without relying on "builds" or any other mumbo-jumbo, the way you would with sphinx or hugo or whatever. Essentially add a new html or markdown file, put whatever you want in it, let's call it "something.md". Then add a link from your index page to "#/something.md" and not deal with builds or styling or whatever, simply commit and move on and have it take care of all the html. And in the case of markdown, parse it and render it as html on the client.
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