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I don't understand why people write programming blogs on Medium. I think that managing a live website with its own server (rather than only working on other peo

I don't understand why people write programming blogs on Medium. I think that managing a live website with its own server (rather than only working on other people's projects) is a very important skill. If you don't want to manage WordPress, try a static site generator like Metalsmith: https://github.com/segmentio/metalsmith https://github.com/segmentio/metalsmith Deploy on Digital Ocean or Linode for $5/month. Free hosting options include Github Pages and Netlify.

BartSaM 9y ago
Or even $2,5 Vultr if you are on a budget.
- simik 9y ago
  They are constantly "Temporarily sold out", at least in European regions.
  - BartSaM 9y ago
    They are available, but only in NY and one more (not sure which). I have confirmed this with their support. I am not sure if they are planning to introduce them in other regions anytime soon. I think NY is pretty much a good global location for America + Europe markets.
    - cupcakestand 9y ago
      Agree that for a western English audience NY is the best location reaching both the US and EU with a ok latency.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
daveguy 9y ago
Another free option: gitlab pages with built in ci configurations for a bunch of different static generators. All you have to do is commit for updates.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
But it's not the same sort of skill as, say, doing low-level graphics programming, or database query optimization. Just because you're a programmer doesn't mean you're a web developer. It's like saying that it doesn't make sense for a carpenter to live in a house they didn't build, or for a heart surgeon not to pull out his own wisdom teeth.
- dasil003 9y ago
  To be fair, it probably doesn't make sense for a dental surgeon to pull his own teeth either.
- Kenji 9y ago
  If you're a halfway decent programmer, deploying a simple blog is trivial. There are many existing solutions that don't even require you to write a single line of code, and the problem is simple enough that you could write the entire thing yourself.
  - matwood 9y ago
    > If you're a halfway decent programmer, deploying a simple blog is trivial. The first thing a halfway decent programmer learns is to not reinvent the wheel. I could implement some json library, but I have better things to do. I could deploy and manage wordpress, but that would be a waste of my time. This relates to a post from the last couple days where a potential game programmer got lost in some random issue instead of focusing on making a fun game. When blogging, content should be the focus, not managing a website.
    - Kenji 9y ago
      I like keeping what I do on my website because it is my property and I would never populate other people's websites with my content, unless I got enough money for it.
- cupcakestand 9y ago
  I disagree. It doesn't matter what kind of coder you are, at some point you always deal with a shell. And setting up a blog on bare metal is done in few minutes on a shell. If you have never faced a shell or a remote server as a developer then you should find a toy project to do so. It's not the worst skill to have. Moreover, I wouldn't see basic HTML or CSS as specific knowledge. This is something every coder knows (like English), of course not advanced layout stuff like Flexbox but the basic of HTML and CSS are common knowledge. And you do not need React, Webpack or any advanced stuff to make a simple SSG blog. You even don't need to understand HTML or CSS if you just stick with the standard templates. Just Markdown. Edit: Why the downvote?
ageitgey 9y ago
Some people (like me) write programing blogs on medium because it's much easier to get an audience there then on your own domain. It has nothing to do with technical issues. Like it or not, often more people will discover and share medium articles than posts on a no-name domain.
- vit05 9y ago
  I think that is the main reason for most of the non-technical people too. Medium started as a great way to be discovered. They have a minimal style that makes people compare the text and content. Is something totally different from host a weblog.
- styfle 9y ago
  This is precisely why I created a medium account-- because there is already an audience that is reading, liking, and commenting on articles. I tested this theory by cross posting articles to both my domain[0] and to Medium[1]. The Medium article has thousands of views in a month and my domain gets maybe 20 views a month. This is partly because "publishers" pick up articles on Medium which shows it to a new audience. [0]: https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2017-05-09-nodejs-promisify.md https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2017-05-09-nodejs... [1]: https://medium.com/front-end-hacking/promises-in-node-js-8-x-core-d6a8a93e85a2 https://medium.com/front-end-hacking/promises-in-node-js-8-x...
- technofiend 9y ago
  That and there's every chance tight web filters will block a random domain; I can't read the linked article, for instance.
qznc 9y ago
I did not know Netlify and looked it up. I found this image [0] on their features page. Is that a joke or does their cli tool really use left-pad? [0] https://www.netlify.com/img/features/section-art/dev-tools.png https://www.netlify.com/img/features/section-art/dev-tools.p...
- icebraining 9y ago
  I think it's a joke (npm doesn't list it). I would say the next two packages were just joke names, but apparently "is-positive-integer" does exist[1]... though I suppose it might still be a more elaborate joke, but 1000+ downloads per month? The JavaScript world is simply amazing. [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-positive-integer https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-positive-integer
  - int_19h 9y ago
    It's not a joke. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11350142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11350142
- bobfunk 9y ago
  It's a joke, we don't actually use neither left-pad nor is-positive-integer...
tayo42 9y ago
Their day job might be managing servers :)
untog 9y ago
There's more to Medium than exists on the surface. It's an entire social network of people recommending and tagging articles, newsletters, all sorts - I've gotten good long term traffic before now from posting on Medium, traffic that lasts a lot longer than a short term (but much higher) burst from a Reddit or HN post. The problem for Medium is that it just wasn't successful enough. If a lot more people were using it, it would make sense as a social platform. But it's mostly just a blog platform people link to. (also, being able to host a blog is an important skill, but I'd never dismiss a programmer who wrote a fascinating article just because they didn't also self-host it. I could just as easily make the case that writing clearly is an important skill, and any programmer who wrote an incoherent blog post is not worth their salt. But I won't.)
Rjevski 9y ago
For me the main problem with self hosting is that I ended up spending more time tinkering with the website than actually writing content for it. A hosted platform like Medium or Svbtle solves this problem.
mercer 9y ago
I can't speak for others, but one reason why I'd use something like Medium is precisely to ensure that I don't manage anything by myself except for the content production part. I have a long list of attempts at setting up my own site, but because it's mine I wanted to get it just right. And so down the rabbit hole I go: making sure my server is super-secure (because it's important hey I'll learn in the process!), finally trying out Caddy, using Ghost (node.js), building my own static site generator using React for the backend, which of course means updating and perfecting my Ultimate Front-End Setup. And once that's done, I want to do right by the design, and of course make sure my html/css/js is impeccable and that it all runs on every browser under the sun. Of course I love doing this and I learn a lot from it, but if my goal is to write stuff and put it online, this approach never really works. I'm happy it doesn't, because it means I still love what I do more than writing about what I do, but it's one very legitimate reason to use something like Medium.
- giobox 9y ago
  I've had largely the same experiences. Recently I decided to challenge myself to instead keep it simple, rather than treat the whole thing as a "learn some new thing along the way" type exercise. The end result is I actually have a blog I'm actually writing on that is absurdly easy to maintain, rather than the usual (for me anyway!) 75 percent complete side project in some new technology I'll never get around to finishing. Simple VPS, webserver, letsencrypt, static site generator, cloud flare for CDN duties and a little CSS. All I do now is write a new article in Markdown every now and then, then run a simple shell script to regenerate the site and rsync the newly minted static pages to the server. Personal sites or new blogs are all too often victims of premature optimisation - your amazing google PageSpeed score is nice, but who cares if no one is reading.
  - cupcakestand 9y ago
    > Simple VPS, webserver, letsencrypt, static site generator, cloud flare for CDN duties and a little CSS. Why didn't you host on Github Pages and you could have saved all that but having the same flexibilty regarding a SSG use case?
csallen 9y ago
> I don't understand why people write programming blogs on Medium. I think that managing a live website with its own server (rather than only working on other people's projects) is a very important skill. You've listed two different objectives: writing a programming blog, and learning to manage a live website. Why should anyone interested in the first automatically care about the second?
loomer 9y ago
One of the main reasons people use Medium is that their posts will be viewed by random Medium users in addition to their own fan base, thus growing their fan base and getting more views both in the short and long term. I'd compare it to YouTube. People could theoretically host their own videos, but the main reason people use YouTube is because it is so much easier for others to discover your videos. Also, +1 on using Linode! Have had multiple projects on their servers. No downtime at one point for over 365 days.
- movedx 9y ago
  > I'd compare it to YouTube. People could theoretically host their own videos, but the main reason people use YouTube is because it is so much easier for others to discover your videos. I appreciate the effort to create a comparison or analogy here, but hosting video is a far, far bigger problem than hosting some text. Bandwidth costs will reach into the thousands of dollars per month video that gets a few thousands views, which isn't hard to get on YouTube's platform.
  - HappyTypist 9y ago
    You are off by four orders of magnitudes DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode: $0.02 per GB over your transfer limit OVH $9/month VPS: 100mbps unlimited bandwidth, and yes, OVH doesn't care if you have 7x24 100% utilisation on your 100 mbps. Let's say you have a 100MB video that gets 20,000 views, and half of the viewers end up streaming the full video. BW incurred: 1 TB. Cost to you: $20
    - movedx 9y ago
      Have you ever produced videos for mass consumption? I have. They don't weigh in at 100mb. Try 500mb. And the aim with sharing videos is to get as much global reach and viewership as possible -- 20,000 views? What? I want hundreds of thousands of views otherwise what's the point in putting the effort in? If I can produce a blog post in three days that gets 100,000 hits and allows me to provide affiliate links, multiple, constantly visible adverts, and so on, all for $5/month, why would I spend five days writing scripts, filming video, doing post production, and uploading the video for potentially less impact at 10x the cost?
arkitaip 9y ago
It can also be absolutely trivial and soul sucking in that you have to do lots of maintenance when all you want to do is share ideas.
computerex 9y ago
I use Hugo with Digital Ocean and GitHub. Simple nodejs express script is running via PM2 and is listening for GitHub messages and serving as a webhook. Whenever I push to the site repo on GitHub, the webhook fires, which fires the build script, which does a git pull and executes the hugo command to rebuild the site. It's a delightful experience.
- movedx 9y ago
  That build process can be done using TravisCI for free, provided the GitHub repository containing your Hugo base is public (and why wouldn't it be?) This removes the need for that Droplet and its associated cost.
  - computerex 9y ago
    Nice, good to know. I'll use Travis in the future for some side projects. But for my site/blog I think I'll stick to using my current droplet because I currently have no build time delay, and hugo is very fast. As soon as the push to github is complete, I just refresh my browser and the changes are in. With Travis it appears all open source projects share the same build queue so it can take minutes for the changes to take effect.
    - movedx 9y ago
      That's fair enough.
huebnerob 9y ago
Don't underestimate the value of a known format. I have just as much distaste for Medium as the next person, but at least I know how to navigate the site and I don't need to constantly be subject to the unique style choices of the individual. If it's your site, you can obviously do whatever you want with it, but realize that deciding on Helvetica Neue Ultralight on a low contrast background is only broadcasting your unique lack of design pragmatism.
cupcakestand 9y ago
Totally agree. Code embedding is also limited on Medium, I think they still lack syntax highlighting. Btw, great tip wih Netlify. How is your experience with them, what are pros cons compared to Github Pages and can I run server code like Node for free?
- rhizome 9y ago
  OT, but syntax highlighting is hardly the weakest part of displaying code on a webpage. Nobody's disrupting horizontal scrollbars or margin-busting, but the first person who does is going to be a hero.
  - fgandiya 9y ago
    I was so close to doing this when I was making my new blog, then I found out that the CSS element responsible for making the code block scollable isn't supported on mobile.
- movedx 9y ago
  > Totally agree. Code embedding is also limited on Medium, I think they still lack syntax highlighting. Limited how? I find embedding GitHub Gist's works perfectly fine and is automatic -- just paste the link to the Gist in your post and you get an embedded object.
- cyberferret 9y ago
  Any time I have to embed code in Medium, I just type the code in a free Github Gist and post the link - Medium automatically embeds the Gist in a nice, syntax highlighted format, with a link to the original gist. e.g. (towards bottom of this article I wrote - syntax highlighting in HTML, Javascript and Ruby snippets): https://hackernoon.com/building-a-face-recognition-web-app-in-under-an-hour-345aa91487c https://hackernoon.com/building-a-face-recognition-web-app-i...
bdcravens 9y ago
Why would a programmer use Github when they could easily run Gitlab on Digital Ocean?
- movedx 9y ago
  GitHub's UI is far superior, for one. You're also placing your code in an ecosystem of other OSS projects, which I believe is a good thing. Also, GitHub private repositories for an individual are far cheaper than running a H/A GitLab on DO, AWS, Linode, or any provider worth mentioning. By definition of running a H/A solution on DO's cheapest offering, you're paying $15/month for three VMs, and we haven't started talking about backups yet. It's not worth it at all.
  - bdcravens 9y ago
    Many of the same arguments could made for using Medium instead of running your own blog software.
    - movedx 9y ago
      I never said I was against Medium ;) I'm against self hosting when it makes no sense to do so, and only because I've seen people get burnt by the process and I don't want to the same to happen to you. I'm probably capable, but many aren't. Legal or regulatory reasons are the only reasons I can think of that might force your hand in to self-hosting.
  - sytse 9y ago
    What is the nr. 1 thing you would change in GitLab to improve the UI?
- wahern 9y ago
  Because Github is, for the time being, what everybody else is using. You can't go wrong choosing Github in terms of users and contributors being familiar with the interface. That said, I only use Github as a mirror. My "master" repositories are on a private, co-located server. The beautiful thing about Git is that it doesn't require any special software on the server side for hosting--just the regular client. And in particular, Git doesn't require a special daemon service. It doesn't even require a special service for hosting read-only HTTP repositories. The stock Git client can clone repositories over HTTP from static site files. My "official" public Git URLs are just HTTP URLs to a static read-only mirror which is updated from a Git hook when pushing. Those HTTP mirrors required no additional configuration whatsoever; they just sit inside my public_html/ user tree. The secret to running your own server over the long term (I've been co-locating a server for almost 2 decades) is to keep things simple. It helps that I use OpenBSD, which has always maintained default web and mail servers which, even if disabled by default, are still "secure by default" in the sense of the stock software and configuration being well thought through. (This is especially true since OpenBSD replaced sendmail and Apache with their own software.) I originally used CVS before switching to Subversion for a few years. But I was never comfortable exposing even a read-only mirror until I switched to Git, as both CVS and Subversion required special server-side software that I was unwilling to run, let alone maintain. I only started using Github because most other people prefer using Github's interfaces for forking repositories and submitting pull requests. It's a trivial cost on my end (just an additional push), so I don't mind.
crispytx 9y ago
I use Medium because I think their blogging software is superior to their competitors (WordPress). If there was something out there as good as Medium that I could install on my own servers I might do that. This seems to be the hierarchy of blogging software to me: Medium > WordPress > Blogger I'm sure there are some other really great options out there that I've never heard of. And I'm sure if you spend a great deal of time looking you can find kickass WordPress themes. But the default WordPress themes are pretty weak, and Blogger is really weak. So anyway, that's I use Medium to host my blog, because their blogging software simply kicks ass.
- justanton 9y ago
  Did you try Ghost (https://ghost.org https://ghost.org)? Their editor is quite good. Also, they've released version 1.0 a few days ago.
- cyberferret 9y ago
  +1 for Ghost - it is really lightweight, and I have a blog running on it on a $5/mo Digital Ocean instance.
katpas 9y ago
I'm a Web developer and I could manage my own blog site but I choose not to as it would be one more site I have to maintain. I'd rather put that time into building the product for my company or sleeping/doing something else. To suggest that any half way decent programmer should do that is the same as suggesting you write all your css from scratch instead of using a front end library to help. Doable but ultimately is it the best use of your time?
xtracto 9y ago
I've been using ghost and digitalocean for my CV site for some time (godinez.soy) and it has been amazingly easy. As you, I never understood the attraction of the Medium platform for technical people. I mean, Blogspot was there long before them and multiply.com even before (for non-technical people). For non-tech people I understand the value of it, however given the speed at how companies fold nowadays, I would not be happy giving away control of my content to someone else.
shurcooL 9y ago
I tried and gave up right away. You can't even insert a tab character. How can you write any code snippets? https://medium.com/@shurcooL/trying-out-medium-b1cee6165fef https://medium.com/@shurcooL/trying-out-medium-b1cee6165fef
coldtea 9y ago
>I don't understand why people write programming blogs on Medium. I think that managing a live website with its own server (rather than only working on other people's projects) is a very important skill. And knowing when not to waste your time setting up one is an even more important skill.
BinaryIdiot 9y ago
> I don't understand why people write programming blogs on Medium. I think that managing a live website with its own server (rather than only working on other people's projects) is a very important skill. Because doing that yourself is a complete waste of time. Every web developer knows how to make a blog. All of them. So who cares if I make one or not to post my opinions online? No one. So you can either spend the time dealing with server load, updates, maintenance, etc on a project everyone already knows how to develop and proves absolutely nothing about your skills or knowledge (not to mention being more expensive depending on provider and traffic) or you can let someone else handle it for you that may have multiple ways to accessing and publishing your content (medium, square space, wordpress, etc). Managing your time is really important as a developer. Maybe managing a blog is a good use of your time but it certainly isn’t for me.
- ship_it 9y ago
  > So you can either spend the time dealing with server load, updates, maintenance, etc on a project everyone already knows how to develop and proves absolutely nothing about your skills or knowledge Wait, what? The man just give you an option to use static site generator, and he even included the link of one. The cost of using this instead of Medium is absolutely nothing (Github account offer page hosting).
  - BinaryIdiot 9y ago
    > Wait, what? The man just give you an option to use static site generator, and he even included the link of one. The cost of using this instead of Medium is absolutely nothing (Github account offer page hosting). What you seem to be getting at is that your time is worth absolutely nothing and that it is worth using your time to create a simple, static blog and hosting it somewhere free. I disagree that your time is worth nothing but maybe we value our time differently. Regardless it misses my point: if I'm comparing one developer to another it's never going to even enter my mind that they may or may not have developed their own blog because it's an entirely pointless distinction.
superasn 9y ago
Amazon S3 is also a great option for hosting static content. The cost are negligible because you only pay for bandwidth not hosting.
ohfouroneone 9y ago
I have a Medium account and my own blog. On Medium I get about 5K+ readers/month. On my blog I get 5. That's why people write on Medium.
needlessly 9y ago
You don't understand that medium gets more traffic than someone's personal website.
AYBABTME 9y ago
Fatih works at DigitalOcean and absolutely knows how to manage a server. People write blogs on hosted platform, despite being fully capable of hosting it themselves, because they don't want to be managing a server when they set themselves up to write something.
romaniv 9y ago
What I don't understand is why there aren't open online magazines/blogs for this kind of stuff. I.e. a blog with well-defined subject where there is some minor editorial oversight to filter out garbage, but where anyone can submit an article. This strikes the perfect balance between individual blog and a publishing platform. It can have features specific to the subject. The quality will be better. I've run a website like this with a bunch of people in the mid-00s and it was great. It had a real consistent community, and there wasn't a split between "staff" and "readers" which creates so many problems for more traditional online magazines. The whole Web 2.0 movement vilified editor, but I think this was a great disservice to the Web. I'd love to have a website like I described above for programming stuff. It would allow me to concentrate on content, rather than maintenance of my own website and constant self-promotion.

BartSaM 9y ago

Or even $2,5 Vultr if you are on a budget.

simik 9y ago
They are constantly "Temporarily sold out", at least in European regions.
- BartSaM 9y ago
  They are available, but only in NY and one more (not sure which). I have confirmed this with their support. I am not sure if they are planning to introduce them in other regions anytime soon. I think NY is pretty much a good global location for America + Europe markets.
  - cupcakestand 9y ago
    Agree that for a western English audience NY is the best location reaching both the US and EU with a ok latency.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

daveguy 9y ago

Another free option: gitlab pages with built in ci configurations for a bunch of different static generators. All you have to do is commit for updates.

pavel_lishin 9y ago

But it's not the same sort of skill as, say, doing low-level graphics programming, or database query optimization. Just because you're a programmer doesn't mean you're a web developer. It's like saying that it doesn't make sense for a carpenter to live in a house they didn't build, or for a heart surgeon not to pull out his own wisdom teeth.

dasil003 9y ago
To be fair, it probably doesn't make sense for a dental surgeon to pull his own teeth either.
Kenji 9y ago
If you're a halfway decent programmer, deploying a simple blog is trivial. There are many existing solutions that don't even require you to write a single line of code, and the problem is simple enough that you could write the entire thing yourself.
- matwood 9y ago
  > If you're a halfway decent programmer, deploying a simple blog is trivial. The first thing a halfway decent programmer learns is to not reinvent the wheel. I could implement some json library, but I have better things to do. I could deploy and manage wordpress, but that would be a waste of my time. This relates to a post from the last couple days where a potential game programmer got lost in some random issue instead of focusing on making a fun game. When blogging, content should be the focus, not managing a website.
  - Kenji 9y ago
    I like keeping what I do on my website because it is my property and I would never populate other people's websites with my content, unless I got enough money for it.
cupcakestand 9y ago
I disagree. It doesn't matter what kind of coder you are, at some point you always deal with a shell. And setting up a blog on bare metal is done in few minutes on a shell. If you have never faced a shell or a remote server as a developer then you should find a toy project to do so. It's not the worst skill to have. Moreover, I wouldn't see basic HTML or CSS as specific knowledge. This is something every coder knows (like English), of course not advanced layout stuff like Flexbox but the basic of HTML and CSS are common knowledge. And you do not need React, Webpack or any advanced stuff to make a simple SSG blog. You even don't need to understand HTML or CSS if you just stick with the standard templates. Just Markdown. Edit: Why the downvote?

ageitgey 9y ago

Some people (like me) write programing blogs on medium because it's much easier to get an audience there then on your own domain. It has nothing to do with technical issues. Like it or not, often more people will discover and share medium articles than posts on a no-name domain.

vit05 9y ago
I think that is the main reason for most of the non-technical people too. Medium started as a great way to be discovered. They have a minimal style that makes people compare the text and content. Is something totally different from host a weblog.
styfle 9y ago
This is precisely why I created a medium account-- because there is already an audience that is reading, liking, and commenting on articles. I tested this theory by cross posting articles to both my domain[0] and to Medium[1]. The Medium article has thousands of views in a month and my domain gets maybe 20 views a month. This is partly because "publishers" pick up articles on Medium which shows it to a new audience. [0]: https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2017-05-09-nodejs-promisify.md https://www.ceriously.com/blog/post.php?id=2017-05-09-nodejs... [1]: https://medium.com/front-end-hacking/promises-in-node-js-8-x-core-d6a8a93e85a2 https://medium.com/front-end-hacking/promises-in-node-js-8-x...
technofiend 9y ago
That and there's every chance tight web filters will block a random domain; I can't read the linked article, for instance.

qznc 9y ago

I did not know Netlify and looked it up. I found this image [0] on their features page. Is that a joke or does their cli tool really use left-pad? [0] https://www.netlify.com/img/features/section-art/dev-tools.png https://www.netlify.com/img/features/section-art/dev-tools.p...

icebraining 9y ago
I think it's a joke (npm doesn't list it). I would say the next two packages were just joke names, but apparently "is-positive-integer" does exist[1]... though I suppose it might still be a more elaborate joke, but 1000+ downloads per month? The JavaScript world is simply amazing. [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-positive-integer https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-positive-integer
- int_19h 9y ago
  It's not a joke. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11350142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11350142
bobfunk 9y ago
It's a joke, we don't actually use neither left-pad nor is-positive-integer...

tayo42 9y ago

Their day job might be managing servers :)

untog 9y ago

There's more to Medium than exists on the surface. It's an entire social network of people recommending and tagging articles, newsletters, all sorts - I've gotten good long term traffic before now from posting on Medium, traffic that lasts a lot longer than a short term (but much higher) burst from a Reddit or HN post. The problem for Medium is that it just wasn't successful enough. If a lot more people were using it, it would make sense as a social platform. But it's mostly just a blog platform people link to. (also, being able to host a blog is an important skill, but I'd never dismiss a programmer who wrote a fascinating article just because they didn't also self-host it. I could just as easily make the case that writing clearly is an important skill, and any programmer who wrote an incoherent blog post is not worth their salt. But I won't.)

Rjevski 9y ago

For me the main problem with self hosting is that I ended up spending more time tinkering with the website than actually writing content for it. A hosted platform like Medium or Svbtle solves this problem.

mercer 9y ago

I can't speak for others, but one reason why I'd use something like Medium is precisely to ensure that I don't manage anything by myself except for the content production part. I have a long list of attempts at setting up my own site, but because it's mine I wanted to get it just right. And so down the rabbit hole I go: making sure my server is super-secure (because it's important hey I'll learn in the process!), finally trying out Caddy, using Ghost (node.js), building my own static site generator using React for the backend, which of course means updating and perfecting my Ultimate Front-End Setup. And once that's done, I want to do right by the design, and of course make sure my html/css/js is impeccable and that it all runs on every browser under the sun. Of course I love doing this and I learn a lot from it, but if my goal is to write stuff and put it online, this approach never really works. I'm happy it doesn't, because it means I still love what I do more than writing about what I do, but it's one very legitimate reason to use something like Medium.

giobox 9y ago
I've had largely the same experiences. Recently I decided to challenge myself to instead keep it simple, rather than treat the whole thing as a "learn some new thing along the way" type exercise. The end result is I actually have a blog I'm actually writing on that is absurdly easy to maintain, rather than the usual (for me anyway!) 75 percent complete side project in some new technology I'll never get around to finishing. Simple VPS, webserver, letsencrypt, static site generator, cloud flare for CDN duties and a little CSS. All I do now is write a new article in Markdown every now and then, then run a simple shell script to regenerate the site and rsync the newly minted static pages to the server. Personal sites or new blogs are all too often victims of premature optimisation - your amazing google PageSpeed score is nice, but who cares if no one is reading.
- cupcakestand 9y ago
  > Simple VPS, webserver, letsencrypt, static site generator, cloud flare for CDN duties and a little CSS. Why didn't you host on Github Pages and you could have saved all that but having the same flexibilty regarding a SSG use case?

csallen 9y ago

> I don't understand why people write programming blogs on Medium. I think that managing a live website with its own server (rather than only working on other people's projects) is a very important skill. You've listed two different objectives: writing a programming blog, and learning to manage a live website. Why should anyone interested in the first automatically care about the second?

loomer 9y ago

One of the main reasons people use Medium is that their posts will be viewed by random Medium users in addition to their own fan base, thus growing their fan base and getting more views both in the short and long term. I'd compare it to YouTube. People could theoretically host their own videos, but the main reason people use YouTube is because it is so much easier for others to discover your videos. Also, +1 on using Linode! Have had multiple projects on their servers. No downtime at one point for over 365 days.

movedx 9y ago
> I'd compare it to YouTube. People could theoretically host their own videos, but the main reason people use YouTube is because it is so much easier for others to discover your videos. I appreciate the effort to create a comparison or analogy here, but hosting video is a far, far bigger problem than hosting some text. Bandwidth costs will reach into the thousands of dollars per month video that gets a few thousands views, which isn't hard to get on YouTube's platform.
- HappyTypist 9y ago
  You are off by four orders of magnitudes DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode: $0.02 per GB over your transfer limit OVH $9/month VPS: 100mbps unlimited bandwidth, and yes, OVH doesn't care if you have 7x24 100% utilisation on your 100 mbps. Let's say you have a 100MB video that gets 20,000 views, and half of the viewers end up streaming the full video. BW incurred: 1 TB. Cost to you: $20
  - movedx 9y ago
    Have you ever produced videos for mass consumption? I have. They don't weigh in at 100mb. Try 500mb. And the aim with sharing videos is to get as much global reach and viewership as possible -- 20,000 views? What? I want hundreds of thousands of views otherwise what's the point in putting the effort in? If I can produce a blog post in three days that gets 100,000 hits and allows me to provide affiliate links, multiple, constantly visible adverts, and so on, all for $5/month, why would I spend five days writing scripts, filming video, doing post production, and uploading the video for potentially less impact at 10x the cost?

arkitaip 9y ago

It can also be absolutely trivial and soul sucking in that you have to do lots of maintenance when all you want to do is share ideas.

computerex 9y ago

I use Hugo with Digital Ocean and GitHub. Simple nodejs express script is running via PM2 and is listening for GitHub messages and serving as a webhook. Whenever I push to the site repo on GitHub, the webhook fires, which fires the build script, which does a git pull and executes the hugo command to rebuild the site. It's a delightful experience.

movedx 9y ago
That build process can be done using TravisCI for free, provided the GitHub repository containing your Hugo base is public (and why wouldn't it be?) This removes the need for that Droplet and its associated cost.
- computerex 9y ago
  Nice, good to know. I'll use Travis in the future for some side projects. But for my site/blog I think I'll stick to using my current droplet because I currently have no build time delay, and hugo is very fast. As soon as the push to github is complete, I just refresh my browser and the changes are in. With Travis it appears all open source projects share the same build queue so it can take minutes for the changes to take effect.
  - movedx 9y ago
    That's fair enough.

huebnerob 9y ago

Don't underestimate the value of a known format. I have just as much distaste for Medium as the next person, but at least I know how to navigate the site and I don't need to constantly be subject to the unique style choices of the individual. If it's your site, you can obviously do whatever you want with it, but realize that deciding on Helvetica Neue Ultralight on a low contrast background is only broadcasting your unique lack of design pragmatism.

cupcakestand 9y ago

Totally agree. Code embedding is also limited on Medium, I think they still lack syntax highlighting. Btw, great tip wih Netlify. How is your experience with them, what are pros cons compared to Github Pages and can I run server code like Node for free?

rhizome 9y ago
OT, but syntax highlighting is hardly the weakest part of displaying code on a webpage. Nobody's disrupting horizontal scrollbars or margin-busting, but the first person who does is going to be a hero.
- fgandiya 9y ago
  I was so close to doing this when I was making my new blog, then I found out that the CSS element responsible for making the code block scollable isn't supported on mobile.
movedx 9y ago
> Totally agree. Code embedding is also limited on Medium, I think they still lack syntax highlighting. Limited how? I find embedding GitHub Gist's works perfectly fine and is automatic -- just paste the link to the Gist in your post and you get an embedded object.
cyberferret 9y ago
Any time I have to embed code in Medium, I just type the code in a free Github Gist and post the link - Medium automatically embeds the Gist in a nice, syntax highlighted format, with a link to the original gist. e.g. (towards bottom of this article I wrote - syntax highlighting in HTML, Javascript and Ruby snippets): https://hackernoon.com/building-a-face-recognition-web-app-in-under-an-hour-345aa91487c https://hackernoon.com/building-a-face-recognition-web-app-i...

bdcravens 9y ago

Why would a programmer use Github when they could easily run Gitlab on Digital Ocean?

movedx 9y ago
GitHub's UI is far superior, for one. You're also placing your code in an ecosystem of other OSS projects, which I believe is a good thing. Also, GitHub private repositories for an individual are far cheaper than running a H/A GitLab on DO, AWS, Linode, or any provider worth mentioning. By definition of running a H/A solution on DO's cheapest offering, you're paying $15/month for three VMs, and we haven't started talking about backups yet. It's not worth it at all.
- bdcravens 9y ago
  Many of the same arguments could made for using Medium instead of running your own blog software.
  - movedx 9y ago
    I never said I was against Medium ;) I'm against self hosting when it makes no sense to do so, and only because I've seen people get burnt by the process and I don't want to the same to happen to you. I'm probably capable, but many aren't. Legal or regulatory reasons are the only reasons I can think of that might force your hand in to self-hosting.
- sytse 9y ago
  What is the nr. 1 thing you would change in GitLab to improve the UI?
wahern 9y ago
Because Github is, for the time being, what everybody else is using. You can't go wrong choosing Github in terms of users and contributors being familiar with the interface. That said, I only use Github as a mirror. My "master" repositories are on a private, co-located server. The beautiful thing about Git is that it doesn't require any special software on the server side for hosting--just the regular client. And in particular, Git doesn't require a special daemon service. It doesn't even require a special service for hosting read-only HTTP repositories. The stock Git client can clone repositories over HTTP from static site files. My "official" public Git URLs are just HTTP URLs to a static read-only mirror which is updated from a Git hook when pushing. Those HTTP mirrors required no additional configuration whatsoever; they just sit inside my public_html/ user tree. The secret to running your own server over the long term (I've been co-locating a server for almost 2 decades) is to keep things simple. It helps that I use OpenBSD, which has always maintained default web and mail servers which, even if disabled by default, are still "secure by default" in the sense of the stock software and configuration being well thought through. (This is especially true since OpenBSD replaced sendmail and Apache with their own software.) I originally used CVS before switching to Subversion for a few years. But I was never comfortable exposing even a read-only mirror until I switched to Git, as both CVS and Subversion required special server-side software that I was unwilling to run, let alone maintain. I only started using Github because most other people prefer using Github's interfaces for forking repositories and submitting pull requests. It's a trivial cost on my end (just an additional push), so I don't mind.

crispytx 9y ago

I use Medium because I think their blogging software is superior to their competitors (WordPress). If there was something out there as good as Medium that I could install on my own servers I might do that. This seems to be the hierarchy of blogging software to me: Medium > WordPress > Blogger I'm sure there are some other really great options out there that I've never heard of. And I'm sure if you spend a great deal of time looking you can find kickass WordPress themes. But the default WordPress themes are pretty weak, and Blogger is really weak. So anyway, that's I use Medium to host my blog, because their blogging software simply kicks ass.

justanton 9y ago
Did you try Ghost (https://ghost.org https://ghost.org)? Their editor is quite good. Also, they've released version 1.0 a few days ago.
cyberferret 9y ago
+1 for Ghost - it is really lightweight, and I have a blog running on it on a $5/mo Digital Ocean instance.

katpas 9y ago

I'm a Web developer and I could manage my own blog site but I choose not to as it would be one more site I have to maintain. I'd rather put that time into building the product for my company or sleeping/doing something else. To suggest that any half way decent programmer should do that is the same as suggesting you write all your css from scratch instead of using a front end library to help. Doable but ultimately is it the best use of your time?

xtracto 9y ago

I've been using ghost and digitalocean for my CV site for some time (godinez.soy) and it has been amazingly easy. As you, I never understood the attraction of the Medium platform for technical people. I mean, Blogspot was there long before them and multiply.com even before (for non-technical people). For non-tech people I understand the value of it, however given the speed at how companies fold nowadays, I would not be happy giving away control of my content to someone else.

shurcooL 9y ago

I tried and gave up right away. You can't even insert a tab character. How can you write any code snippets? https://medium.com/@shurcooL/trying-out-medium-b1cee6165fef https://medium.com/@shurcooL/trying-out-medium-b1cee6165fef

coldtea 9y ago

BinaryIdiot 9y ago

> I don't understand why people write programming blogs on Medium. I think that managing a live website with its own server (rather than only working on other people's projects) is a very important skill. Because doing that yourself is a complete waste of time. Every web developer knows how to make a blog. All of them. So who cares if I make one or not to post my opinions online? No one. So you can either spend the time dealing with server load, updates, maintenance, etc on a project everyone already knows how to develop and proves absolutely nothing about your skills or knowledge (not to mention being more expensive depending on provider and traffic) or you can let someone else handle it for you that may have multiple ways to accessing and publishing your content (medium, square space, wordpress, etc). Managing your time is really important as a developer. Maybe managing a blog is a good use of your time but it certainly isn’t for me.

ship_it 9y ago
> So you can either spend the time dealing with server load, updates, maintenance, etc on a project everyone already knows how to develop and proves absolutely nothing about your skills or knowledge Wait, what? The man just give you an option to use static site generator, and he even included the link of one. The cost of using this instead of Medium is absolutely nothing (Github account offer page hosting).
- BinaryIdiot 9y ago
  > Wait, what? The man just give you an option to use static site generator, and he even included the link of one. The cost of using this instead of Medium is absolutely nothing (Github account offer page hosting). What you seem to be getting at is that your time is worth absolutely nothing and that it is worth using your time to create a simple, static blog and hosting it somewhere free. I disagree that your time is worth nothing but maybe we value our time differently. Regardless it misses my point: if I'm comparing one developer to another it's never going to even enter my mind that they may or may not have developed their own blog because it's an entirely pointless distinction.

superasn 9y ago

Amazon S3 is also a great option for hosting static content. The cost are negligible because you only pay for bandwidth not hosting.

ohfouroneone 9y ago

I have a Medium account and my own blog. On Medium I get about 5K+ readers/month. On my blog I get 5. That's why people write on Medium.

needlessly 9y ago

You don't understand that medium gets more traffic than someone's personal website.

AYBABTME 9y ago

Fatih works at DigitalOcean and absolutely knows how to manage a server. People write blogs on hosted platform, despite being fully capable of hosting it themselves, because they don't want to be managing a server when they set themselves up to write something.

romaniv 9y ago

What I don't understand is why there aren't open online magazines/blogs for this kind of stuff. I.e. a blog with well-defined subject where there is some minor editorial oversight to filter out garbage, but where anyone can submit an article. This strikes the perfect balance between individual blog and a publishing platform. It can have features specific to the subject. The quality will be better. I've run a website like this with a bunch of people in the mid-00s and it was great. It had a real consistent community, and there wasn't a split between "staff" and "readers" which creates so many problems for more traditional online magazines. The whole Web 2.0 movement vilified editor, but I think this was a great disservice to the Web. I'd love to have a website like I described above for programming stuff. It would allow me to concentrate on content, rather than maintenance of my own website and constant self-promotion.