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I don’t know if it’s a good alternative, but I blog on GitHub using GitHub Pages. It’s a minimalist experience: I use Markdown (optional), and I have my own dom
by braythwayt 8y ago
I don’t know if it’s a good alternative, but I blog on GitHub using GitHub Pages. It’s a minimalist experience: I use Markdown (optional), and I have my own domain (critical!)
If they ever shutter the service, it is very easy to generate all the HTML pages with Jekyll, and then throw them up on a static host.
Every single one of Medium’s discoverability and traffic benefits feel like Faustian bargains to me, so I am not going there.
The last time I experimented with publishing in a walled garden was Posterous, mostly because they were a YCombinator startup at a time when that wasn’t some kind of golden ticket, and I wanted to make a gesture of support for them and for YCombinator.
Posterous shuttered, and I republished my work using GitHub Pages, but all the old urls broke, and I’m never doing that again.
- Biqh1 8y agoI'm curious as to why you say it's 'critical' to have your own domain on Github pages? Is it to do with search engine listings?
- braythwayt 8y agoJoel Spolsky (if you don’t know him, he was one of the first “Celebrity Bloggers” in tech culture) gave me a piece of advice more than a decade ago: Own your own domain and publish under it, that way you always control your content and the links to your content. If my blog was raganwald.githubpages.com, GitHub could theoretically decide that githubpages needed to be deeply integrated with Windows or some other foolishness, and I’d be screwed. But since my blog appears to the world as raganwald.com, I can leave GitHub Pages whenever I like, and all the links will continue to work. It's about long-term control, and for that you need: 1. Control your content, ideally with a copy of the source on your own devices at all time, in an open format with an ecosystem of tooling, and; 2. Control your domain name.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoGitlab has a similar feature. (I haven't used either Github or Gitlab directly to publish a blog, but they're also usefully integrated in the Netlify/Hugo blog workflow.)