Do you use Medium for your programming blog?

Hi, I’m thinking of moving my blog (tutorials, learning notes, etc., with lots of code snippets) to Medium. I just like how they have their own community (therefore better audience reach) and nice UI, giving great experience for writers and readers alike. However it kinda sucks that they don’t have first-class support of code snippets and syntax highlighting, but github gists can help with that. I wanna know how others think.

If you’re a writer, do you use Medium? Why or why not?
If you’re a reader, do you prefer reading posts in Medium? Do you frequently open it?

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I prefer independent blogs tbh - you get a feel for them, their personality etc. If you post on Medium then you’re just another Medium blogger…

But, don’t let that put you off - blog, blog anywhere :003:

(In answer to your question, no, I have my own blog at astonj.com - it’s in dire need of an update tho :lol:)

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I thought one could only post tech posts on Medium if it was a tought piece or rant about why you were leaving some tech community. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I use WordPress, it’s cheap :stuck_out_tongue:

If I weren’t a programmer I’d be all over medium. Because I am I built my blog and I use it as a tool to experiment with. Just rebuilt it with Phoenix actually. :slight_smile:

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Use whatever is simple/easy to make you blog. While blogging, content really is the key. As long as you keep writing good stuff, people will read. If you are just getting started, medium may be the best for you as it has a lot of reach.

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This is the main reason why I want to try Medium. I’ve tried both Wordpress and currently Jekyll (hosted at Github), mainly because the “hey since I’m a developer I should build my own blog, right?” idealism. But with them, I spent more time customizing it to my liking (which never seems perfect every time I came back to it). Me being somewhat perfectionist doesn’t help. I end up writing more HTML and Sass rather than the actual content, which makes me sad :sweat_smile:

Medium doesn’t let me have a say in most of the design, in the sense that they took care of it for me (at the expense of the individuality of the blog), so…

You could always use Medium and create a Publication to use a custom domain if you’re worried about perceived quality associated with Medium blogs.

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Is there such a thing? I mean, I know I have quite a negative sentiment over blogs using Blogger/Blogspot, but Medium seems full of quality content, at least for me.

I guess it depends where you read or intend to share your articles. I get the vibe from the Hacker News community that Medium articles aren’t the greatest of quality. I’m of the stance that some articles are better than other regardless of blogging platform or service.

I use both, Medium and my own blog powered by Jekyll.

I find Nikola a bit better than Jekyll, tried both when I was setting up http://blog.overminddl1.com/ and yes that is an ugly custom theme I edited, I’m no designer. ^.^

But it is hosted on github pages, which is free. I should host it on my own server though, that way https would work, not like I don’t have the servers either. ^.^

Hmm, I could host any blogs if anyone wants.

I considered it for a time, but then I came to my senses and remembered I know perfectly well how to make and host websites, and that I prefer to have ownership and control. Evidently, I’m not the only one.

I recently re-booted my blog at https://christopheradams.io

Still using Jekyll after all these years. One very cool feature I added was a “source” link at the bottom of each page which links to the same file on Github. I got the idea from ExDoc.

I use Medium for my tech blog and I love it, I place my code snippets in Gist (Github) and it works.

Check it out https://henricus.xyz

I’m actually not a fan of things like Medium because I see things like this on such blogs (this is at work/Chrome/Firefox and home/Chrome/Firefox/Opera):

I’ve used Medium once (twice?) now to write blogs. While I like the ecosystem that they have created, (and the typeface they use is wonderful!) I find the tools they have for development-geared blogs to be a little lacking.

I’m used to be able to write the markup in my articles using LaTeX or Markdown. In Medium, you need some weird key combination to create a code block. I’ve also encountered the issue that @OvermindDL1 mentions myself.

The next time I’m writing a blog, I think I’ll use some Markdown postprocessor like Jekyll (or maybe I’ll roll my own).

I think Medium is a great tool for people outside of the tech-community, but it would be great if they added some functionality that made it easier to add code snippets and text formatting.

I put in another +1 for Nikola, it is basically Jekyll++, plugins for about anything, ease to theme, supports dozens of markup formats, practically designed for devs, uses Python, static-site-generator, can auto-deploy to a githhub branch or to a custom server via ssh/rsync/whatever, etc… :slight_smile:

You can look at my blog source code on github to see how to use it or configure it if you are curious. :slight_smile:

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If I ever start blogging again, I’d likely try Medium first (I’ve got a couple drafts just sitting there for months…). While I can setup a website, I find no value in it. Sort of the same reason I gave up using a Linux Laptop. Once there was a reasonable alternative ( unix tools on a laptop), it just too much time in relation to the value I got out of the exercise.

Might still look at Github Pages. You manage your blog entirely in git and github displays it up via a special named branch (can do it on any of your repo’s actually, just have to specially name a branch and enable it in the project settings).

If you’re into Medium’s reach and your’re a dev, why not use best of both worlds? Medium has an API https://github.com/Medium/medium-api-docs and if you use WordPress you can take a look at their Medium Plugin, if only to get an idea how to do it yourself https://github.com/Medium/medium-wordpress-plugin