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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

#171

Post by nicbou »

badsectoracula wrote: post #24
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…

Another easy solution, both for hosting and ownership, is using a static site generator/editor. I like desktop-based visual WYSIWYG tools so i use Publii[0] (example[1], though i really need to write something more :-P or at least move some older articles i had in now-defunct blogs that were hosted by others). I'm not a big fan of the program though (i dislike how it is based on Electron while not even taking advanta…

Personally, I prefer a good ol' CMS. I manage my website by visiting a URL. I edit the content in a WYSIWYG editor, and it goes live when I press "Save". I don't need to install anything on my machine to write new content.

With a properly set up cache, your website will be serving static files anyway.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#172

Post by thesehands »

nicbou wrote: post #166
MangoCoffee wrote: post #141

"It’s always better to own your platform" - 100% i listen to some Joe Rogan's podcast when he got some interesting guests. i don't remember which one but Joe mentioned Twitter ban Zuby for a reply to someone with "OK, dude". i look up Zuby and yup. Twitter ban Zuby for saying "OK, dude" to someone. how the fuck is "OK, dude" hateful? Joe said Zuby is the nicest guy that he ever meet and Joe is right. they come for Zu…

> the cancel culture in the West Is it really in the West, or just in the United States? Perhaps I'm just not paying attention, but I don't recall anything similar happening in my country. At least it definitely doesn't seem to have the same importance.

At this point, the UK is very much in the same state as the US.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#173

Post by thn-gap »

I've been thinking recently on the idea of writing for the sake of sharing (be it a short story, some thoughts, or any tutorial), but I like anonymity. For this, I'd like to not host my content, but maybe have some fake profile on social media, and share my writings, which could be hosted on Telegram's telegra.ph. Is there a better platform for my use case, or a reason not to use telegra.ph?

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#174

Post by Brajeshwar »

jacobkania wrote: post #86
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.

You might check out mine!! Been waiting ages to share this. You create a folder of markdown files, you have 2 template HTML files (index and blog post), and you run my program (MMSSG). It compiles the index page with a list of all the posts, then renders the HTML for each markdown file into a separate blog post. That's it. Handles the linking and everything for you. It’s all open source and the templates are already…

Wow! I just did this few months back.

I started collecting my writings, all in Markdown and some HTML. Just a bunch of folders as topics, and then write markdown files inside them.

Then, a week or so ago, I threw in Jekyll and now they are published as the cheapest form of Digital Garden for me and hopefully, my family - https://oinam.fyi

The crappy code is at https://github.com/oinam/oinam.fyi and is not even worth being a template.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#175

Post by lostlogin »

tomjen3 wrote: post #168
lostlogin wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the current Western society is in a very sad state. To play devils advocate, when was ‘western culture’ great? Pretty much any time period that comes to mind has a rather large set of inconvenient exceptions.

But those exceptions wheren't because we did too much western culture, but because we did too little. E.g the evil of slavery wasn't because we respected the value of individual rights too much, but because we respected them too little.

You can’t just say that the bad bits aren’t part of a culture. Surely those abused or disadvantaged minorities were part of western culture? One culture can have a set of values that are contradictory.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#176

Post by nicbou »

axegon_ wrote: post #143
tomcam wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is still a terrible thing to do. What’s the alternative, assuming the blogger doesn’t want to give everything away for free?

If the content is of any real value, I'd be more than happy to pay for it with money. 10 bucks? Sure, here you go. A much better option than getting emails such as "20 lessons I learned from my job interview" or whatever.

Everyone says they'd do that, but I find really hard to believe.

I create rare, valuable information that saves people money and headaches. On a good month, 2% of my revenue will come from donations. Usually, it's 0%. At best, it pays for a meal and a beer. This website has 135k page views per month.

If that's how much I get from teaching people how to navigate German bureaucracy, I doubt you'll make anything from your opinions alone.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#177

Post by coldtea »

mhss wrote: post #164
coldtea wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course I'm not supporting nazism Nazism is the easy target. The precedence is removal of something legal by a moral/social decision by a corporate entity. This is dangerous. In the 50s, had they had internet, it could be leftist or communist sympathizers' blogs (under the red scare). In the 60s it could be blacks civil rights blogs (imagine a conservative southern CDN), In the 70s/80s it could be pro-gay writing…

>>> Nazism is the easy target. The precedence is removal of something legal by a moral/social decision by a corporate entity. This is dangerous. Do we want companies to do just what's legal or what's moral? in the end even laws are supposed to be trailing morality and disagreements are expected on what's moral and what's not. This is again the same old debate of whether is some sort of fundamental right to be served…

>Do we want companies to do just what's legal or what's moral?

Content hosting platforms I want them to merely do what's legal.

It's not up to them to make moral decisions.

They could still make those (moral decisions) in other areas, e.g. paying their employees a good salary and not exploiting them, paying taxes, and so on.

>This is again the same old debate of whether is some sort of fundamental right to be served by Cloudflare or have your content hosted by Twitter.

I think that's mostly a debate in US culture, where the concepts about censorship begin and end with what some founding Santas said 3 centuries ago and its all about what the state can and cannot do.

In 2020, platforms are more important than the state for censoring. They even have larger revenue than entire countries GDPs, and they are also operated by people promoting their own culture and national interests, while catering to an international audience of billions. It's the ultimate soft power space and has vastly eclipsed the "public square".

So, in 2020, as opposed to 1920 where the public square might have been enough, having access to something like Google or YouTube should be enforced as a legal right unless explicitly cut off by court order (as opposed by corporate whim).

Even economically, if you think about it, think how Google search ranking for example (or lack thereof) could sink companies globally at the whim of Google operators.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#178

Post by ethiclub »

nickcotter wrote: post #163
ethiclub wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, for many (most?) non-technical folk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Even if you are well-versed in how to do it, it can still be a time sink you may not be able to afford.

And you wouldn't even know that another solution necessarily existed.

And you wouldn't necessarily know where to start.

And you would have the mental hurdles of "where do I start", "who do I listen to", etc.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#179

Post by MangoCoffee »

thesehands wrote: post #172
nicbou wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the cancel culture in the West Is it really in the West, or just in the United States? Perhaps I'm just not paying attention, but I don't recall anything similar happening in my country. At least it definitely doesn't seem to have the same importance.

At this point, the UK is very much in the same state as the US.

jk rowling - they praise her when she said something they like. they want to cancel her when she said something they don't like.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#180

Post by LordDragonfang »

tomjen3 wrote: post #168
lostlogin wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the current Western society is in a very sad state. To play devils advocate, when was ‘western culture’ great? Pretty much any time period that comes to mind has a rather large set of inconvenient exceptions.

But those exceptions wheren't because we did too much western culture, but because we did too little. E.g the evil of slavery wasn't because we respected the value of individual rights too much, but because we respected them too little.

Interesting how you're framing "western culture" as being exclusively the positive aspects, while ignoring the fact that western culture has, until very recently, included more exceptions to the rights of the individual than not.

What you're doing is literally textbook whitewashing of history.

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