Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ditching Medium

joshjahans.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–125 of 125 posts

Re: Ditching Medium

#121

Post by mnmlsm »

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…

Medium is OK for reblogging, but for original dev blogs Hashnode is much better if you want to use an external platform.

Re: Ditching Medium

#122

Post by SamWhited »

Volt wrote: post #78
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…

Medium does have RSS feeds: " rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/feed/

In case I wasn't clear, I want to read blogs, not random users comments.

Re: Ditching Medium

#123

Post by npunt »

tedmiston wrote: post #77
npunt wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The DO one-click is super easy, but the SSL config and adding Cloudflare wound up being a huge pain. DO's docs aren't great and that meant I spent hours in config land just trying to get tablestakes blog features of HTTPS and DDoS protection.

Ghost 2.0 is definitely better than prior versions but still needs babysitting. As an infrequent blogger, I've found I am updating Ghost more frequently than I'm blogging.

Github pages or Gatsby (via something like Netlify) are much better suited to this problem because server config & SSL are handled and they're just serving static pages.

Re: Ditching Medium

#124

Post by tedmiston »

npunt wrote: post #123
tedmiston wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The DO one-click is super easy, but the SSL config and adding Cloudflare wound up being a huge pain. DO's docs aren't great and that meant I spent hours in config land just trying to get tablestakes blog features of HTTPS and DDoS protection. Ghost 2.0 is definitely better than prior versions but still needs babysitting. As an infrequent blogger, I've found I am updating Ghost more frequently than I'm blogging. Githu…

I used Cloudflare with Ghost pre-2.0 but switched to Let's Encrypt for 2.0 [1]. I found this easier than using Cloudflare with 2.0 which handles auto renewing the cert as well.

[1]: https://docs.ghost.org/integrations/lets-encrypt/

Re: Ditching Medium

#125

Post by Kye »

jpatokal wrote: post #53
PaulHoule wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$72 a year is not a lot of money. If you got a $1.00 coffee every other day from McDonald's it would be twice that. The main reason why the web is such a sight for sore eyes in 2019 is that people seem to think $72 a year is a lot for having a voice. People can find 10x that for a new iPhone or spend that much on beer in a month or on a cable subscription but having a blog sure can't be worth much to most people. For…

It's a fair amount of money compared to a hosted Wordpress.com site that costs $0/yr (foo.wordpress.com), $13/yr (custom domain) or $50/yr (custom domain, no ads), and has the safety valve of being able to export and move to any other WP host including self-hosting at any time.

WordPress started requiring a premium package to add a domain. I discovered this during the checkout process when I decided to give them another try. $48/year at a minimum.
Post reply on HN