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

Medium is not the home for your ideas

hulry.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 377 posts

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#311

Post by axegon_ »

cozzyd wrote: post #290
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…

So you're talking about a static site generator implemented in javascript in the browser? I don't see why it wouldn't work as long as the webserver supported directory listings, but it would obviously completely break for clients not using javascript. The simplest solution I've used is to just have a Makefile that indexes and stitches together pages using cat/sed/ls. Sure, you have to run make (and possibly make uplo…

Essentially yes, this is what my personal site is currently running(though it is empty as it stands, largely due to time constraints). Except I wrote it in Dart because I abhor javascript with a passion, even if the final output is still javascript.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#312

Post by axegon_ »

iamacyborg wrote: post #293
axegon_ wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So write HTML and push that directly to your webserver. A much better option. Still have to deal with the de-facto boilerplate of every html file: head, body, header, footer. Which is why I built something that does it in the browser for me. > Forgive me for suggesting the first thing that popped into mind, could you run the generator script locally and also push the /public dir which your server then serves direct…

> A much better option. Still have to deal with the de-facto boilerplate of every html file: head, body, header, footer. Which is why I built something that does it in the browser for me. I find it fascinating that you'd go to all the trouble to build what essentially breaks down to a custom static site generator but you then balk at using an off the shelf one with a build script.

The difference is that ci-type of solutions might end up requiring maintenance for a million and one reasons. This won't and building it took me roughly the same amount of time it would take me to navigate through a ci-solution and test that I've set it up correctly(3 hours in total).

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#313

Post by InvisibleUp »

cube00 wrote: post #67
jjcm wrote: post #45

Another thing I would echo here is that you don't necessarily need a CMS / WYSIWYG editor to run a great blog. A tiny script that dynamically compiles your markdown flavour of choice and has a nginx reverse proxy in front of it will be able to survive a reddit frontpage hit on a $5/mo vps, and it will be dead simple to set up. If you're looking to move off Medium, give it a try. If anyone is interested I'm happy to s…

Add a free tiered CDN in front of that and you're certainly good to survive any spike in traffic.

At least from my own experience, my own website is hosted on a simple $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet with a simple Flask backend that basically just converts Markdown to HTML and generates index pages and RSS and embed metadata and such. It's been completely fine with the surge of traffic from Hacker News; barely broke a sweat. CDNs only make sense imo if you're consistently having Hacker News levels of traffic.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#314

Post by wishinghand »

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…

Looking up Zuby's antics, seems like he intentionally used "OK dude" to insult a transwoman. Misgendering people intentionally is hateful. Not sure where your confusion stems from.

This is after he tried to dismiss the legitimacy of trans people by way of entering a woman's weightlifting competition, claiming he identified as a woman while not out as trans. These dumbass shenanigans are consistently done by folks who "don't believe" in transpeople, or go the route of claiming they have a mental illness.

The rest of the world already cancelled transpeople before the phrase cancel culture existed. Give them a break already.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#315

Post by jlokier »

jvehent wrote: post #307
jlokier wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good point!

Only if your site gets picked up by archive.org though.

(That's only going to happen with static sites, not those which require login or signup, etc.)

Even then your ideas will still effectively disappear because search engines don't appear to crawl archive.org. (If they do it's incomplete - my own past content on archive.org does not get found by specific Google searches.) But perhaps search will change in future.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#316

Post by graton »

Medium is the reason that I installed Cookie AutoDelete [0]. I finally got tired of doing shift-F9 and deleting cookies :)

Now that I have been using Cookie AutoDelete and enabling it so that it does delete cookies automatically (and whitelisting the sites I care about) it has been very nice.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#317

Post by sexy_seedbox »

InvisibleUp wrote: post #308
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/

But Github has been going down or having major issues every month now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22802536

I would go with Netlify or Vercel with Gitlab.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#319

Post by qayxc »

bakedbeanz wrote: post #281

Not defending Medium here, but I do have an issue with this point: > The web is meant for free speech. Your content shouldn’t be jailed for being controversial. You mentioned your profile was taken offline after being mistakenly caught in their spam filter. Shouldn't spam blocking be a basic function of a publishing site? Obviously in a perfect world there wouldn't be false positives, but sometimes these things happe…

Straight from their Terms of Service [1]:

  We can remove any content you post for any reason.
They also clarify that they have rules [2] that users need to follow. Also government takedown requests might be followed without even notifying you if the law prevents them from doing so.

So even if it wasn't a mistake, takedowns may still happen for whatever reasons and you need to take this into account before you start using the platform.

I really don't understand why some people complain about services doing exactly what's stated "on the box".

[1] https://policy.medium.com/medium-terms-of-service-9db0094a1e...

[2] https://policy.medium.com/medium-rules-30e5502c4eb4

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#320

Post by jacobolus »

account42 wrote: post #228
notahacker wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. The desire to 'cancel' sentiments and people they don't like, or at least not grant them particular platforms is the societal default, not some kind of modern exception. Transpeople have been 'cancelled' from all sorts of opportunities since time immemorial without a single person outraged at Zuby's short term Twitter suspension being prepared to defend them to the death...

A yes, the good old "other people have been treated worse in the past so it's ok to treat that person badly now" argument.

As an example from today, wouldn’t ejecting people opposed to Trump from the CA GOP be a clear-cut example of “cancel culture”?

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-07-22/california...

Except I promise you that you’ll never hear one of these pro-bigot pundits oh-so-worried about creeping cancelism complaining about that. Because again, they have no problem with things being “canceled” for political disagreement, and indeed are themselves constantly demanding various “cancellations”. It’s only ever a problem when someone calls out bigotry. “Canceling” someone as part of a defense of bigotry is considered by these pundits to be perfectly fine.

Post reply on HN