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> Please comment if you can think of better alternatives to Medium In my opinion a personal blog or website on a personal domain is the most credible way to pu

> Please comment if you can think of better alternatives to Medium In my opinion a personal blog or website on a personal domain is the most credible way to publish your ideas.

melenaboija 4y ago
Agree. To me a personal blog shows more commitment from the author for two reasons: you have to spend some time to ser it up and search engines tend to position them high when you search for the author name. Even Medium posts being signed I don’t know why it gives me some anonymity feeling and makes it harder to navigate through other content from that same author.
- jotm 4y ago
  Committing to SERPs is challenging. Unless your domain itself has your full name, a Medium article with your name in there will rank higher than your personal blog... Although I remember there being some option to verify a website for name searches on Google. That plus having a Twatter/Fecebook/HN/etc account to confirm the official site should be enough to reasonably avoid impersonators.
  - prepend 4y ago
    Is this an issue? I’ve never run into people impersonating real people with websites. Are there situations where someone pretends to be John Doe and to rank higher? To what end?
tkgally 4y ago
I agree. I get a positive impression from articles on self-produced websites with personal domains. They show that the author has put some thought, effort, and money into the presentation and preservation of their writing. Creating such sites might be out of reach for a lot of nontechnical folks, but people in the dev and tech communities should be able to handle it.
- epolanski 4y ago
  > preservation of their writing A third party site is more likely to preserve your work in time than you remembering to pay and host your content.
  - tkgally 4y ago
    That may be true. But a third-party site might also go out of business, throw up a paywall unexpectedly, or decided for some reason that what you wrote is not appropriate for the site and take it down.
ur-whale 4y ago
>a personal blog or website on a personal domain is the most credible way to publish 100% agree. Doing that also gives you a ton of street cred as opposed to writing on medium where you're right off the bat announcing to the world that you've basically surrendered your stuff to someone else the moment you finished writing it.
Vibgyor5 4y ago
What are some platforms you'd recommend for non-tech folks who'd like to have a simple personal site+blog?
- lolinder 4y ago
  WordPress.com is easy to set up, has custom domains, and you could theoretically move it to another host pretty easily later (unlike SquareSpace). Bret Devereaux's history blog (acoup.blog) is hosted there, and it does very well here on HN.
  - fmajid 4y ago
    He's a historian and can hardly be expected to perform the developer yak-shaving that is running your own blog infrastructure (and I mean that in the kindest possible way, as I run my own as well, but my wife and daughter are on WordPress, albeit hosted by me, because of the UI hurdles of Hugo).
    - lolinder 4y ago
      Yep, the person I was replying to was asking for recommendations for non-techies. I wasn't about to recommend a static site generator...
      - fmajid 4y ago
        There are SSGs with nice WYSIWYG UIs coming, including one for Hugo. https://open.quiqr.org https://open.quiqr.org That still leaves the question of how to handle site search and comments.
  - Vibgyor5 4y ago
    Thanks for your recommendation. I have used WordPress in the past. Although its been a few years, I found it cumbersome to set up a simple site; you often needed some custom plugins, most templates look archaic to me, and importantly, the loading speed was slower. I spent more time fixing something and troubleshooting than actually writing. Right now, I am using a Notion website builder: https://super.so/ https://super.so/ It serves my need as someone who wanted to have a personal website. More like a resume tbh. No bells and whistles. I am used to Notion so that’s another plus. And the page loads fairly quickly. However, I find that at $12/month, I could get better value elsehwere. Not to mention, I am unable to blog there. One of the platforms that attract me is Ghost (https://ghost.org/vs/wordpress/ https://ghost.org/vs/wordpress/). Open-source and I’ve found the websites there have a far more modern-look.
fmajid 4y ago
Own your presence on the web, don't be a sharecropper on Medium (or Blogger.com, or Wordpress.com, or any other plantation). I used to run my own Wordpress blog (don't recommend it any more because of the security issues), now it's a Hugo blog hosted on AWS Cloudfront. Costs me about $4 to $5 a month to run.
- prepend 4y ago
  With a Hugo blog there’s lots of hosting options. You can host on GitHub for free (paying for your own domain). I’ve been using the same random cpanel host for $30/year that has unlimited domains and sites. It’s not trivial but was painless to set up. I think it’s kind of fun to see the various setups that devs use to host their stuff. Medium isn’t a long term solution, so aside from its other problems (terrible aesthetic and UX), I’d still want some sustainability for hosting.
  - fmajid 4y ago
    CloudFlare Pages is also free, although I've had no luck getting the SSL certificate part of it working. Plus I am not sure I want to support CloudFlare with its expanding grip on the web, like forcing users with cookie-blockers or VPNs to go through intrusive CAPTCHAs to access sites.
hackitup7 4y ago
Agreed with that. Somewhat related, the biggest issue that I'm currently struggling with is whether or not to move our content to Substack to take advantage of their discovery mechanisms. I don't love the idea of giving up that degree of control. Curious if anyone has thoughts or experience on that front.

> Please comment if you can think of better alternatives to Medium In my opinion a personal blog or website on a personal domain is the most credible way to publish your ideas.

melenaboija 4y ago

Agree. To me a personal blog shows more commitment from the author for two reasons: you have to spend some time to ser it up and search engines tend to position them high when you search for the author name. Even Medium posts being signed I don’t know why it gives me some anonymity feeling and makes it harder to navigate through other content from that same author.

jotm 4y ago
Committing to SERPs is challenging. Unless your domain itself has your full name, a Medium article with your name in there will rank higher than your personal blog... Although I remember there being some option to verify a website for name searches on Google. That plus having a Twatter/Fecebook/HN/etc account to confirm the official site should be enough to reasonably avoid impersonators.
- prepend 4y ago
  Is this an issue? I’ve never run into people impersonating real people with websites. Are there situations where someone pretends to be John Doe and to rank higher? To what end?

tkgally 4y ago

I agree. I get a positive impression from articles on self-produced websites with personal domains. They show that the author has put some thought, effort, and money into the presentation and preservation of their writing. Creating such sites might be out of reach for a lot of nontechnical folks, but people in the dev and tech communities should be able to handle it.

epolanski 4y ago
> preservation of their writing A third party site is more likely to preserve your work in time than you remembering to pay and host your content.
- tkgally 4y ago
  That may be true. But a third-party site might also go out of business, throw up a paywall unexpectedly, or decided for some reason that what you wrote is not appropriate for the site and take it down.

ur-whale 4y ago

>a personal blog or website on a personal domain is the most credible way to publish 100% agree. Doing that also gives you a ton of street cred as opposed to writing on medium where you're right off the bat announcing to the world that you've basically surrendered your stuff to someone else the moment you finished writing it.

Vibgyor5 4y ago

What are some platforms you'd recommend for non-tech folks who'd like to have a simple personal site+blog?

lolinder 4y ago
WordPress.com is easy to set up, has custom domains, and you could theoretically move it to another host pretty easily later (unlike SquareSpace). Bret Devereaux's history blog (acoup.blog) is hosted there, and it does very well here on HN.
- fmajid 4y ago
  He's a historian and can hardly be expected to perform the developer yak-shaving that is running your own blog infrastructure (and I mean that in the kindest possible way, as I run my own as well, but my wife and daughter are on WordPress, albeit hosted by me, because of the UI hurdles of Hugo).
  - lolinder 4y ago
    Yep, the person I was replying to was asking for recommendations for non-techies. I wasn't about to recommend a static site generator...
    - fmajid 4y ago
      There are SSGs with nice WYSIWYG UIs coming, including one for Hugo. https://open.quiqr.org https://open.quiqr.org That still leaves the question of how to handle site search and comments.
- Vibgyor5 4y ago
  Thanks for your recommendation. I have used WordPress in the past. Although its been a few years, I found it cumbersome to set up a simple site; you often needed some custom plugins, most templates look archaic to me, and importantly, the loading speed was slower. I spent more time fixing something and troubleshooting than actually writing. Right now, I am using a Notion website builder: https://super.so/ https://super.so/ It serves my need as someone who wanted to have a personal website. More like a resume tbh. No bells and whistles. I am used to Notion so that’s another plus. And the page loads fairly quickly. However, I find that at $12/month, I could get better value elsehwere. Not to mention, I am unable to blog there. One of the platforms that attract me is Ghost (https://ghost.org/vs/wordpress/ https://ghost.org/vs/wordpress/). Open-source and I’ve found the websites there have a far more modern-look.

fmajid 4y ago

Own your presence on the web, don't be a sharecropper on Medium (or Blogger.com, or Wordpress.com, or any other plantation). I used to run my own Wordpress blog (don't recommend it any more because of the security issues), now it's a Hugo blog hosted on AWS Cloudfront. Costs me about $4 to $5 a month to run.

prepend 4y ago
With a Hugo blog there’s lots of hosting options. You can host on GitHub for free (paying for your own domain). I’ve been using the same random cpanel host for $30/year that has unlimited domains and sites. It’s not trivial but was painless to set up. I think it’s kind of fun to see the various setups that devs use to host their stuff. Medium isn’t a long term solution, so aside from its other problems (terrible aesthetic and UX), I’d still want some sustainability for hosting.
- fmajid 4y ago
  CloudFlare Pages is also free, although I've had no luck getting the SSL certificate part of it working. Plus I am not sure I want to support CloudFlare with its expanding grip on the web, like forcing users with cookie-blockers or VPNs to go through intrusive CAPTCHAs to access sites.

hackitup7 4y ago

Agreed with that. Somewhat related, the biggest issue that I'm currently struggling with is whether or not to move our content to Substack to take advantage of their discovery mechanisms. I don't love the idea of giving up that degree of control. Curious if anyone has thoughts or experience on that front.