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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

#81

Post by johnchristopher »

alicemaz wrote: post #26
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

medium had one killer insight, which was that if they dolled up blog posts to look like prestige news site articles, most people would mentally put them in the same category. at one point there was a wave of public figures using medium basically like they use/d the nyt oped section before and after but they messed up their site chasing a business model, and nyt/wapo/etc basically turned into tech companies and fill t…

You mean this https://substack.com/ ? Never heard of it, thanks.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#82

Post by krtkush »

quattrofan wrote: post #58
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...

Because I mentioned GitHub? The thing is GitHub is just a wrapper. All my data is still with me and I can switch to GitLab in about a hours time. Also, unlike Medium, GitHub does not put a quota on number of free articles per month nor does it cover 1/4th of the page with a permanent pop-up asking the reader to sign up.

I feel GitHub pages and Medium are not the same thing.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#83

Post by everfree »

Jaruzel wrote: post #64
moonchild wrote: post #32

> Google might add negative signals for your website, thinking that you copy-pasted an article from Medium on your blog. Can you get around this by posting the medium version later than the one on your own website? (Obviously, G crawls medium more frequently; so say, maybe, a week later.)

I was going to ask a similar Q, but I'll hitch my comment to yours... (and give you an upvote as well) To get around Google thinking that your personal hosted version is a copy, can you pepper the medium version with links back to your domain/blog ? Would that help ?

Just use their import tool, it's designed specifically for that purpose.

https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a...

It sets up a canonical tag and backdates your post to prevent just that from happening.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#84

Post by jojobas »

jiggawatts wrote: post #55
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.

Try Jekyll.

In addition to the above it generates static pages rather than looking into the database and templates all the time.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#85

Post by d13 »

axegon_ wrote: post #78
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.

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…

https://github.com/kittykatattack/thepoetrybook

Did something like that years and years ago as a learning project. Works great! Drop in some markdown and you’re done. The source is only a few hundred lines; no build or package manager.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#86

Post by jacobkania »

jiggawatts wrote: post #55
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.

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 made, modify to your heart’s content. It's also REALLY simple, so should be easy to understand my code.

It’s what I used to generate my blog, and there’s instructions in the readme to get going quickly :) It's super simple and I really love it. This is my post about it, and the github link:

https://jacobkania.com/2020-01-18-the-great-blog-project/

https://github.com/jacobkania/mmssg

--

Edit: Just reverted a couple of commits from a WIP plugins feature that I got bored of and quit, and created new versions of the binaries (Linux and Windows are untested). Also updated this comment with a better description.

I'm going to bed, feel free to respond with any feedback! Thanks for looking :)

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#87

Post by hamandcheese »

jiggawatts wrote: post #55
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.

a) seems like a very arbitrary restriction

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#88

Post by krautsourced »

simula67 wrote: post #28
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…

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.

Install Wordfence. The free version is enough. Regularly checks the site for dodgy files, blocks spammers and offers 2FA for login. Big fan since it prevented multiple hack attempts to several of my sites.

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#89

Post by vishnu_ks »

dgellow wrote: post #56
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 t…

Thanks! Yeah. Blog planets are awesome. They defintely played a big role in me coming up with diff.blog. https://rubyland.news/ in particular, which I came across while I was trying to learn Rails. Though diff.blog is built using Django and not Ruby on Rails :)

Re: Medium is not the home for your ideas

#90

Post by steve_adams_86 »

chillfox wrote: post #69
simula67 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant in a hands-off manner.

You automate the updates. Also be very selective about installing plugins. If you are extra paranoid then you can put the login/admin/api behind a vpn.

Being selective about plugins is so important. When I first started working independently, I was blown away by how much work could be had just saving people from the misery of Wordpress plugins. Not glorious work, but wow, you could work until the sun is gone just churning out plugin updates for Wordpress site owners.

Almost all of the problem plugins weren’t even that important to the site. Someone just added it at some point and left it, maybe for years. Then there you are running old code with known exploits. Of course you’re going to get hacked.

Although I didn’t enjoy that work, I did love how excited and happy my clients were that their sites were fixed. You can’t measure the misery and anxiety some people feel when stuff goes wrong with their websites. Fixing that, with php and Wordpress no less, was a great feeling.

All that is to say that I agree; only adopt plugins you really need with a reputation you’re comfortable with.

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