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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

#51

Post by chillfox »

Fiveplus wrote: post #18
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…

Is the entry to barrier to new trendy static site generators relatively higher? Or how does this approach differ from them? Having never tried options like hugo I've always wanted to know about them directly from people who've used those.

If you are a developer or sysadmin then they are easy, but for people at the service desk level or below they are challenging to impossible.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#52

Post by krtkush »

The number of large (and hip) software companies which host their blogs on medium is mind boggling. With the amount of time they spend reinventing the wheels, one would think they would spend some time setting up their own blog.

Also, why do people host their tech tutorials on Medium? I have few of my own and always put them up on my own github pages blog. It's not too difficult.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#53

Post by krn »

> A lot of companies like Basecamp and Spotify executed this idea with their company blogs.

> They started with a Medium publication, and when they gained traction on their content, they moved to their own hosted blogs.

This is false. Basecamp's blog "Signal v Noise" is much older than Medium itself, and their transition perfectly illustrates what Medium has become[1]:

> Three years ago we embraced an exciting new publishing platform called Medium. It felt like a new start for a writing community, and we benefitted immensely from the boost in reach and readership those early days brought. But alas it was not to last.

> When we moved over, Medium was all about attracting big blogs and other publishers. This was going to be a new space for a new time where publishers could find a home. And it was. For a while.

> These days Medium is focused on their membership offering, though. Trying to aggregate writing from many sources and sell a broad subscription on top of that. And it’s a neat model, and it’s wonderful to see Medium try something different. But it’s not for us, and it’s not for Signal v Noise.

[...]

> So now we’re back on the indie trail. The new blog is powered by our friends at WordPress, and the new amazing design is courtesy of our in-house designer Adam Stoddard.

> Thanks to the fact that we kept our own domain when we moved to Medium, all the articles and links still work. The pieces have simply swapped the Medium styling for our own look. (Although, sad to say, Medium didn’t let us export the comments, so those are gone ).

[1] https://m.signalvnoise.com/signal-v-noise-exits-medium/

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#54

Post by Alir3z4 »

I have gone through the same phase myself. Not only Medium but many other platforms as well.

The algo based recommendation that force feed you the content that "they" think you should read and constant trackers all over the place that profiles everyone with heavy ads scripts with tons of js css files just to read a simple text from someone.

I've built what I had in mind (_sort of_) for myself and many others.

Anyone wants to start a blog, without the headache of self hosting or maintenance without ads and sneaky business model is welcome gonevis.com

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#55

Post by jiggawatts »

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…

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.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#56

Post by dgellow »

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…

Thanks for sharing, that's a nice project with a good user experience. That reminds me of the concept of blog "planet" that was somewhat popular in the Linux world a decade ago. Basically an aggregate of blog feeds loosely related to a given topic, you can follow it and have the feeling that you're following a community, without the drama that you have on social media. It's a great concept IMHO, and stupidly simple technically speaking.

As an example, Ubuntu still has theirs: https://planet.ubuntu.com/

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#57

Post by quattrofan »

paulie_a wrote: post #25
tomc1985 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, was it? From the beginning everything on Medium seemed to be written by folks who styled themselves as "thought leaders," but clearly weren't

Thought leader is a synonym for empty suit. If someone uses that in a bio you can just move along, you won't miss anything.

100% this. I also noticed a trend of people calling themselves "visionaries"...same thing.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#58

Post by quattrofan »

krtkush wrote: post #52

The number of large (and hip) software companies which host their blogs on medium is mind boggling. With the amount of time they spend reinventing the wheels, one would think they would spend some time setting up their own blog. Also, why do people host their tech tutorials on Medium? I have few of my own and always put them up on my own github pages blog. It's not too difficult.

My irony alarm just went off...

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#59

Post by simula67 »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #36
simula67 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you make sure you don't get hacked using Wordpress? I hosted my own blog for a short while and got hacked, so I moved back to Wordpress.com.

Strong passwords and regular updates. Ive had a WordPress blog for 15 years self hosted and havent to my knowledge been hacked yet.

I meant in a hands-off manner.
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