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Medium is doing a great job on the web design front already! Reading on my laptop, there was a fixed header taking up about 10-15% of my screen height (in fulls
by SllX 8y ago
Medium is doing a great job on the web design front already! Reading on my laptop, there was a fixed header taking up about 10-15% of my screen height (in fullscreen), a fixed social networking sidebar on the left and a lovely dialog box attached to the bottom of the screen letting me know I can subscribe to Medium for $5/month. Best part about that bottom bar is that just in case I haven't subscribed when I closed it out, it is more than happy to show up after a few minutes when I've switched back to the tab, as it did while I was composing this commentary.
Really helps the readability of the website, which I especially appreciate on a website devoted entirely to reading. Really makes me wonder why Firefox even bothers with a Reader mode when we have high quality web design like this!
Let's never go back to hosting our own writing on our own websites. Medium has made that obsolete.
- paulryanrogers 8y ago^/s
- lowtolerance 8y agoIt’s impossible to read any article regarding web design on Medium without having to seriously question whether it’s intended to be satire or not.
- cryptozeus 8y agoThis.. “Don’t know anything about web development at all? Don’t worry you can just take a week long bootcamp! Already a web developer? Buy the C programming language book here and get out while you still can.”
- anonytrary 8y agoThe article in this post is clearly satire.
- Pxtl 8y agoYup. I like to hold my phone landscape. The overlays reduced the viewing area to a single line of text. Closed the tab.
- JoshMnem 8y agoStylus[1] (permanently removing all the fixed elements) and Firefox reader mode are the only things that make Medium bearable. Static site generators are the way to go. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/
- cpeterso 8y agoIn a mobile browser, they also obscure the article text with an "Open in app" button that stays on screen as you scroll.
- hspak 8y agoHa! Satire aside: With high quality open source publishing tools like Hugo[1] and Ghost[2], and free hosting from GitLab/GitHub pages, there's little excuse not to self-publish. Even using a paid service like Squarespace would be a step up in my opinion. [1] https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/ [2] https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/
- interfixus 8y ago> and free hosting from GitLab/GitHub pages, there's little excuse not to self-publish Seems like satire has settled in for the duration.
- kkarakk 8y agowhat's the problem with GitHub pages?
- interfixus 8y agoI'm amused to see GitHub thought of as self-publishing. It is nothing of the kind. It's someone else's platform granting you an instantly revocable right to use their facilities, no - or just a few thousand - strings attached. In principle no different from Facebook and Twitter and all the other shoddy complimentary crap.
- doesnt_know 8y agoIt's different in that I am the customer, I literally give them money to host my stuff. They can of course stop hosting my stuff at any time, but then I will also stop giving them money. I'm not 100% sure since I'm a developer and not an entrepreneur, but I think they prefer to receive money rather than not receive money.
- torgoguys 8y agoFor you, yes. If you look up at the ancestor posts you'll see the discussion was about free hosting at GitHub/gitlab.
- ageitgey 8y agoFor writers who feel stuck on Medium given it's recent downward trajectory, I'll just leave this here: https://github.com/ageitgey/medium_to_ghost https://github.com/ageitgey/medium_to_ghost
- thangngoc89 8y agoDid you try Make Medium Readable again ? HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16516126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16516126 Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/make-medium-readable-agai/kljjfejkagofbgklifblndjelgabcmig https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/make-medium-readab... Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/make-medium-readable-again/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/make-medium-r...
- SllX 8y agoFirefox has a reader mode. I use that for websites with terrible designs that are ostensibly made with the idea I would read them, but seem to have a completely different goal the poor writers on the other end are not clued in on. Add-ons designed to "fix" a specific website are to be considered harmful. If a website can't respect its readership, an add-on isn't going to fix their attitude. To be clear this isn't a choice of otherwise equal trade-offs and which you make are a matter of taste. The types of sites described within the original article, the type of page I described upon loading Medium for the first time in probably a couple of months, and the behaviors described in the comments from the people that replied to my post are blatantly disrespectful to their readers.
- corbpie 8y agoits so great they run a freemium model with amateur writers
- mgkimsal 8y ago> Really makes me wonder why Firefox even bothers with a Reader mode when we have high quality web design like this! Perhaps someone will make a 'medium' plugin for FF to make the plain reader mode behave more like medium? ;)
- chrismorgan 8y agoReader mode is about:reader, which is protected from modifications by extensions. (This annoys me, because I’d like an actual black on white theme in reader mode, and I can’t do that without, if I recall correctly, userContent.css modifications, which you can’t do on mobile.)
- scns 8y agoCheck out the ff plugin Dark background an light text
- pmontra 8y agoOn Android: turn on reader mode, press the Aa button in the bottom right, press Light. The page is displayed with black text on white background.
- chrismorgan 8y agoWhoops, I meant white on black, which is much better than light grey on dark grey, on devices like OLED displays. Sigh.
- pmontra 8y agoThat's the default for me, or touch Dark in that screen. Ah, I zoomed in and saw it: the text is not white, it's light gray.
- chrismorgan 8y ago#eee on #333 is a long way off #fff on #000.
- ddebernardy 8y ago`Clean Up` bookmarklet is your friend: javascript:(function(){(function(){var%20i,elements=document.querySelectorAll('body%20*');for(i=0;i<elements.length;i++){var%20p=getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position;if(p==='fixed'||p==='sticky'||p==='-webkit-sticky'){elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]);}}})()})()
- posix_me_less 8y agoThis is great, thank you.
- err4nt 8y agoRefactored to be shorter and more modern: javascript:Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('body *')).filter(tag => ['fixed', 'sticky', '-webkit-sticky'].some(prop => window.getComputedStyle(tag).position === prop)).forEach(tag => tag.parentNode.removeChild(tag))
- spiralx 8y agoEven more shorter and modern :) javascript:(() => document.body.querySelectorAll('*').forEach(el => { if (['fixed', 'sticky', '-webkit-sticky'].includes(getComputedStyle(el).position)) { el.remove() }))()
- winningcontinue 8y agoMedium is not doing any type of good job. Going on the website, i'm immediately flooded with a layout of pictures and headlines designed to gain my attention. Clicking on an article, I get two notifications that pop-up regarding their privacy policy and then their premium service. Their entire schtick is designed to distract you and keep you on their site for as long as possible, as part of a scheme to monetize as much out of every visitor. For a much better design, check out something like instapaper or it's competitors.
- lelandbatey 8y agoI know people say that sarcasm is hard to pick up in text form, but I didn't think it was that tough.
- SllX 8y agoMy friend, my comrade in arms, your technological taste and superior sensibilities are second to none.
- wishinghand 8y agoThe comment you're responding to was sarcastic/satirical.
- anonytrary 8y agoI think their fixed header is way too big, even on my monitor. > Let's never go back to hosting our own writing on our own websites. Medium has made that obsolete. Medium has not made that obsolete at all, and you sound like a shill. Encouraging people to host their own websites leads to a more free future. Search, networking and analytics can be done on top of that layer. Strong network coherence is why social networks currently exist as centralized services, but it's a bandaid that patches an unsolved problem.
- ZeikJT 8y agoPretty sure it was satire
- nickjj 8y agoThis screenshot of Medium is on a 1080p monitor at 100% scaling: https://imgur.com/a/gMa8dQT https://imgur.com/a/gMa8dQT Almost half the view space is Medium surrounding the article with whatever intentions they want to push on readers. I publish all of my posts directly on my site (static site with Jekyll) but I used to republish most of them on Medium, but as of a few months ago I pulled all of them off Medium. Medium really doesn't do anything for you unless you use them as their primary platform and YOU drive traffic to the articles, in which case, you might as well just use your own platform.