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I used to write on medium. The editor is the best. Nothing I've used is as good. The stats are also incredibly well done. Some people are saying authors use it

I used to write on medium. The editor is the best. Nothing I've used is as good. The stats are also incredibly well done. Some people are saying authors use it for the built-in audience. I can't say that was an appeal for me—or that I got very many readers from within medium anyways. I started my own blog with hugo/netlify (though notably I don't post things very often). The main reason I switched is because so many people enable the pay wall on medium I feel the medium brand is hurting my own now, even though I've never enabled the pay wall myself. I definitely miss that editor—and not having to update the site's dependencies.

yingw787 7y ago
I’ve found the editor to not be as great when it comes to including code blocks, widgets, or other javascript I want to execute. Hugo is a lot more flexible in that sense. You can include graphviz and charts.js no problem, and keep your network request below 1mb. On the other hand, Hugo’s quality is verrrry dependent on the theme you pick. Configs change from theme to theme. Hand rolling a theme from scratch is also a severe pain. I don’t think there are any paid themes for Hugo, and if there are I’m not sure it’s as good of an ecosystem as say Wordpress.
sytelus 7y ago
Lot of these can be done with simple open source blogging tools like Hugo combined with analytics. The main value of Medium in my mind is the amount of default “trust” that Google places on the content hosted on Medium. Your article on arcane topic on Medium will typically out rank other web sites who might have existed forever.
- dickeytk 7y ago
  That’s not at all why I used it. And the analytics medium has (even though it’s basic) are better than any third-party tools I’ve used.
nickjj 7y ago
> I used to write on medium. The editor is the best. Nothing I've used is as good. What about a local code editor with live reloading on a local copy of your site running in a browser? This is what I do in Jekyll. I write everything in the same code editor I wrote code in, and on save, I see a 100% replicated live view of my site in about 1 second (even with 200+ posts). Both windows sit side by side. To me this beats any alternative set up.
- dickeytk 7y ago
  It’s good, still not as good as medium. Especially being able to copy and paste YouTube/gist/etc links in and have them auto-embed. I can still embed with Hugo, but not as quickly and this does impact my writing flow.
  - nickjj 7y ago
    I can't speak for Hugo but with Jekyll, I solved this by writing a few line plugin. It still involves putting in a short custom tag (which I have as an editor snippet) and paste in the video ID. It's not as pleasant as pasting a URL in but it takes about 3 seconds to get it all set up when I want to embed a video. Very minimal impact IMO. If I had to embed hundreds of videos all the time I would probably just write a custom plugin that scans the file and converts Youtube URLs to embed snippets.

yingw787 7y ago

I’ve found the editor to not be as great when it comes to including code blocks, widgets, or other javascript I want to execute. Hugo is a lot more flexible in that sense. You can include graphviz and charts.js no problem, and keep your network request below 1mb. On the other hand, Hugo’s quality is verrrry dependent on the theme you pick. Configs change from theme to theme. Hand rolling a theme from scratch is also a severe pain. I don’t think there are any paid themes for Hugo, and if there are I’m not sure it’s as good of an ecosystem as say Wordpress.

sytelus 7y ago

Lot of these can be done with simple open source blogging tools like Hugo combined with analytics. The main value of Medium in my mind is the amount of default “trust” that Google places on the content hosted on Medium. Your article on arcane topic on Medium will typically out rank other web sites who might have existed forever.

dickeytk 7y ago
That’s not at all why I used it. And the analytics medium has (even though it’s basic) are better than any third-party tools I’ve used.

nickjj 7y ago

> I used to write on medium. The editor is the best. Nothing I've used is as good. What about a local code editor with live reloading on a local copy of your site running in a browser? This is what I do in Jekyll. I write everything in the same code editor I wrote code in, and on save, I see a 100% replicated live view of my site in about 1 second (even with 200+ posts). Both windows sit side by side. To me this beats any alternative set up.

dickeytk 7y ago
It’s good, still not as good as medium. Especially being able to copy and paste YouTube/gist/etc links in and have them auto-embed. I can still embed with Hugo, but not as quickly and this does impact my writing flow.
- nickjj 7y ago
  I can't speak for Hugo but with Jekyll, I solved this by writing a few line plugin. It still involves putting in a short custom tag (which I have as an editor snippet) and paste in the video ID. It's not as pleasant as pasting a URL in but it takes about 3 seconds to get it all set up when I want to embed a video. Very minimal impact IMO. If I had to embed hundreds of videos all the time I would probably just write a custom plugin that scans the file and converts Youtube URLs to embed snippets.