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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
by 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 agoI'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?
- giobox 9y agoThat's a hugely popular option for sure, and great for a ton of static site use cases, but you do sacrifice the flexibility of deploying whatever the hell you want on your own VPS. Who knows what I might want to do in the future?
- corobo 9y ago> Why didn't you host on Github Pages Tried that once, fell down a 3 day rabbit hole trying all the static blog generators.. ended up picking WordPress.
- ValentineC 9y ago> Tried that once, fell down a 3 day rabbit hole trying all the static blog generators.. ended up picking WordPress. I'm still falling through the very same hole. What made you pick WordPress?
- corobo 9y agoHonestly no real reason other than it's the one I know and didn't want to spend any more time on finding software to write with instead of spending the time on writing Essentially it was the default option
- ValentineC 9y agoHeh I can empathise. Two of my biggest reasons for wanting to move to a static site generator are actually to have actual control over the content (in markdown files, and because WordPress and its plugins do a fair bit of processing on the raw content), and because I'm more comfortable hacking in languages that aren't PHP. That seems to have stopped me from writing though.
- corobo 9y ago> more comfortable hacking in languages that aren't PHP Oddly enough it was the opposite of that for me. Each of the static site generators I looked at were non-PHP (which is fine but I lack the experience) I tell you what, if someone ever had a gun to my head and said "make this Ruby software work first time without errors" they might as well just pull the trigger
- tomc1985 9y ago> cloud flare for CDN duties Unless you're pulling a lot of traffic this isn't necessary
- giobox 9y agoTrue, but the free account is trivial to setup, and because entire site is static I can use cloud flare to cache the entire thing. They also have some nice features entirely unrelated to scale ("Always Online" is a good example). Given the barrier to doing this is virtually non-existent (it's a handful of clicks on the CloudFlare dashboard), seems silly not to take advantage.
- tomc1985 9y agoMaybe... but everything was so wonderfully independent before Cloudflare gets dragged in
- computerex 9y agoSelf control is an amazing skill mate.
- rainbowmverse 9y agoSelf-control is mostly just arranging your life to avoid situations that are known to cause problems.
- OtterCoder 9y agoAnd that doesn't take skill?
- another-dave 9y agoNot that it doesn't take skill, but not putting yourself in that situation (by using something off the shelf) is applying that skill :)
- Antrikshy 9y agoMedium is great and you have perfectly legitimate reasons to use it. But if you ever consider setting up your own website and/or blog, look into Jekyll (the site builder) and GitHub Pages for hosting.
- needlessly 9y agoIf i am a chef, sometimes I'm tired and just want to order take out. Same applies for a dev posting on medium