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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

#301

Post by wishinghand »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #13
wishinghand wrote: post #4

Kirby and other similar PHP based flat file CMS software is super easy to run. If I were to get back into making sites for people, I'd just use Kirby, Bulma/Tailwind, and Alpine.js. It can run on shared hosts like Siteground, Lithium, Green Geeks, Hostgator, as well as VPS platforms like Digital Ocean. The admin interface for making new posts is great, separating it from static site generators. It uses a modified Mar…

I run a site on Grav, which appears to be very similar to Kirby but FOSS, with plenty of free themes and plugins (though the base installation is pretty complete). It's super easy to install compared to WordPress, and I've never had luck getting NodeJS-based software like Ghost to work and then stay working for a long time. For a personal blog it has all the features you would need, while being pretty simple. But , s…

I agree it's not as easy as starting a wordpress.com site or even a self hosted Wordpress site if the host has a 1 click builder, but if a user can figure out basic PHP hosting, they can run Kirby (and presumably Grav).

Grav's advantage over Kirby is that it's totally FOSS, but I encountered Kirby first and have a more thorough understanding of how it works. The maintainers and community are also quite helpful as well as super lenient about unlicensed usage.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#302

Post by frenchyatwork »

willvarfar wrote: post #106
pyr0hu wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Jigsaw, it's a PHP based static site generator

I have set non-technical people up using Markdown+pelican. I have no idea what made us use Pelican instead of something else, nor if those advantages still hold weight, but it’s been great.

For what it's worth, I prefer Pelican, largely because I can write a plugin if I need, without incurring significant brain damage.

I've written code in PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript before, it's just not my first choice.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#303

Post by mholt »

Terretta wrote: post #300
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…

Posted this deeper in thread, also noting up here: Just serve your markdown git repo using Caddy. https://caddyserver.com/docs/markdown ”Caddy is both a flexible, efficient static file server and a powerful, scalable reverse proxy. Use it to serve your static site with compression, template evaluation, Markdown rendering, and more.” https://caddyserver.com/ Here’s a blog on doing this with the older version of Caddy:…

FYI our v1 site went away this week (we've had redirects for about 7 months now). Here's the link to the v2 docs for markdown rendering with templates: https://caddyserver.com/docs/modules/http.handlers.templates...

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#304

Post by joosters »

rahulchowdhury wrote: post #250
joosters wrote: post #184

Even though Medium reinstated my profile, I stopped publishing on the platform and moved to my blog again. There's some history re-writing going on here. The tweet from Medium about unblocking his account was in July 2018 - the author replied with 'Happens. No worries. Thanks for resolving the issue guys', so they clearly weren't too bothered about this at the time. They then went on to post over ten further articles…

Just to clear the air here. The posts that you are talking about were either for company blogs, or casual "I don't care if they live or die" kind of posts. At around the same time, I started working on a small blogging platform of my own but gave up and started using SSGs like Gatsby, Jekyll, etc. More on the move here: https://hulry.com/back-to-wordpress/ Hope this clears things up. :)

Hey, thanks for the reply, and I should apologise to you: While it still seems to me that the cause, effect & justification for leaving medium seems strange, I didn't mean to accuse you of intentionally lying or deceiving people in your article, sorry for the terrible wording.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#305

Post by jiggunjer »

hunter2_ wrote: post #272
zby wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is what does it really mean to have 'your own platform'? Does it mean that you need to have your own server at your bedroom? Or is it enough to rent one at a server room, or a shared host or maybe just rent some web space? What with your internet connectivity? Or just electicity - do you need to generate your own? You always depend on someone and in theory that someone can take your blog down. I think th…

Paying helps, but even then, they are usually terms against abusive behavior. It seems that what constitutes abuse reduces as you go up the chain (for example: perhaps a social network forbids false information and worse, perhaps a hosted CMS forbids hate speech and worse, perhaps a VPS/colo/residential forbids only very illegal activity) but it's always there to some extent. Maybe it's about human abuse and maybe it…

Sure. Just invent your own Internet.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#306

Post by jlokier »

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…

Counterpoint (devil's advocate):

When you get sick, poor or die, your own platform will almost certainly disappear, taking your content and ideas with it.

If it's on Medium, your content is more likely to survive your demise.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#307

Post by jvehent »

jlokier wrote: post #306
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…

Counterpoint (devil's advocate): When you get sick, poor or die, your own platform will almost certainly disappear, taking your content and ideas with it. If it's on Medium, your content is more likely to survive your demise.

that's why archive.org exists

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#308

Post by InvisibleUp »

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…

IMO, a really easy way to start would be with a GitHub pages repo[1] or a Neocities site[2]. You really shouldn't need anything more than basic HTML and CSS for most blogs. If you want tags or sidebars or RSS, you can use a static site generator like Jekyll[3], and it's still pretty simple.

[1]: https://pages.github.com/ [2]: https://neocities.org/ [3]: https://jekyllrb.com/

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#309

Post by insickness »

axegon_ wrote: post #65
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…

I agree. Many years ago I was really happy with medium as a reader. And the feed algorithm was decent enough. By no means the perfect content but for the most part it pushed forward things I was interested in. However, the monetization model turned medium(originally a decent blogging platform) into tumblr and it was a race to the bottom from that point. Any website that asks you to register in order to read a blog po…

So you read the full blog post for free, then you get to the bottom and see that they are promoting an e-book free in exchange for an email address and that's terrible to you? Does it piss you off when authors don't give away their books for free as well?

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#310

Post by dhimes »

siscia wrote: post #103
axegon_ wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Many years ago I was really happy with medium as a reader. And the feed algorithm was decent enough. By no means the perfect content but for the most part it pushed forward things I was interested in. However, the monetization model turned medium(originally a decent blogging platform) into tumblr and it was a race to the bottom from that point. Any website that asks you to register in order to read a blog po…

Writing good content take time and the content is valuable. I don't see it wrong to use it as marketing strategy.

I agree there's nothing wrong with it. But does it work? Does Medium make money? It might be, despite the whining, they have it right in that they don't let an expectation of "this is free" ever develop.

That strategy might be better than writing a long-ish blog entry as a teaser, where the reader thinks they are going to get their information for free, only to be told "Psyche! You've actually got to pay for it!"

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