Some have their self-hosted blogs, but I also see a lot of open source projects (including very popular ones) using Medium.com.
I thought it was a nice timing to ask this question considering today's news about medium. Is it worth it to use medium as your project's main blog? Appreciate any ideas.
Shit, they added that back in November. I probably should have checked first before writing my review.
https://blog.medium.com/introducing-three-new-features-to-te...
You still have to start the code block (```) first before pasting I think.
That's only a concern if you care about how many people read your blog, but if you do, it's a concern.
Medium's also very readable. If you choose your own theme for your blog, the chances are you'll hit a theme that's "less readable". Often, programming blogs are a LOT less readable. So that's worth considering too.
(All other points made elsewhere about control of your content, compatibility with FOSS philosophy, etc, are good ones too and I won't repeat them here.)
Cross-posting to both a self-hosted blog and Medium isn't a bad solution. Or use a custom domain, as suggested.
I think when we say "audience", it can mean different things.
For example, Medium has potential to bring a huge "instant" audience, but there's a difference between instant audience and long term audience.
I just went and took a look at all the large open source projects, and they all have their own blog on their own domain. AND, what comes next is important. They have:
1. RSS feed button
2. Link to subscribe to the blog via email
I think these are important in the long term if you are thinking about looking at your open source project from a long term point of view. Medium may give you instant traffic, but most of them don't really care about what you have to say.
Whereas having your own custom domain with a way for people to subscribe via RSS or email will give you a long term audience who are actually genuinely interested in your project. And with those formats it is very likely that your message will reach them, compared to medium where it may just flow away from their timeline without them ever noticing.
Neither an RSS feed nor a subscribe link enable people to find you in the first place. They do, however, make it more likely that they'll come back after finding you.
You should absolutely also build retention techniques into your Medium posts. And your custom blog. And anywhere else where you care about people reading your content, and keeping on reading it.
You could add a link to your RSS feed to the bottom of each post as a workaround, but this is far from ideal.
I agree that self-hosting + custom domain is better in this aspect.
[0] https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214874118-RSS-Feed...
All the other hosted platforms frankly could stop working a year or two from now. Medium doesn't have a viable business model and probably won't get one, it's only a matter of time when it closes shop, like many other platforms before it.
In the end, there is no escape from bit rot, yet things like IPFS[1] are trying to solve this.
The reason I would not just post on Medium is simply because you are depend on them. What if Medium at some point shuts down, you lose all your content.
Most websites have these conditions, but I've copied the most jarring ones below for what it's worth [0]:
> We can remove any content you post for any reason.
> We may change, terminate, or restrict access to any aspect of the service, at any time, without notice.
[0] https://medium.com/policy/medium-terms-of-service-9db0094a1e...
Also, Medium is a great way for people to follow a variety of blogs - so not only do we still get all of the reads we get from normal sources like Twitter, sharing, etc, but you get a lot of people reading your posts from their Medium feed. In fact, for a lot of posts most of the views come from our Medium subscribers.
I agree with other commenters that setting up a custom domain is a good idea if you think you might want to move to some other platform in the future, especially if Medium is not around forever.
1. https://jumasheff.github.io/ 2. https://github.com/jumasheff/jumasheff.github.io 3. https://github.com/rafrex/spa-github-pages/
Another option is to use a custom domain with Medium[0]. That way, if Medium goes out of business, you could just set up a self-hosted replacement blog with redirects for the URLs for the posts you made on Medium.
You can also buy managed Ghost, WordPress, etc for not that much. I think both pro accounts allow custom domains and exporting.
If you're a developer, or comfortable with code, static web site generation (Hugo, Jekyll, middleman, etc) might be an option too.
I certainly wouldn't use Github pages - it's just as centralized/non-FOSS/etc., but more work and tends to look less good. Wordpress gives you self-hostability but means you're running on PHP. In the long term I'd hope for a sandstorm-based self-hostable blog that's as easy to use (and looks as good) as Medium, but I'm not aware of such a thing existing yet.
In terms of deployment, using Sphinx enables you to easily deploy to readthedocs.io, or github pages.
Since it is a static site generate, it also enables you to use bootstrap, any javascript front-end library you wish to use, so nothing stops you from having web-application type behaviour and interactions in your posts. It also integrates nicely with extensions, such as mermaid, to make graphs inline with your posts. It can include code snippets from code, offers syntax highlighting and a lot more.
If you are considering blogging for more than announcements and are new to authoring blogs, then I recommend "256 Bloghacks" by Yegor256 as a good starting point to know what to expect, and good ideas to consider. http://amzn.to/2i07fs2
I realize Medium gives you discoverability, but so do some other places (posting to LinkedIn, text posts to relevant subreddits etc.) so I would suggest cross-posting to those after posting the link to your own site and adding it to webmaster tools so it will get indexed first.
I even wrote an article about it : http://softwarebythomas.com/blog/post/Why-I-left-wordpress-f...!
Link :
http://softwarebythomas.com/blog/post/Why-I-left-wordpress-f...!
I'm curious how you can use both. if you have two sites and share both links, what links would people share? Doesn't this make it more confusing for sharers?
Maybe this article of today, will help you decide
1. Quora
2. Medium
3. PostHaven
4. LinkedIn
5. Tumblr
6. BlogSpot
I mean, it wasn't all sunshine and daises... But, I was interested in learning how hosting my own blog, Windows Server 2016, and SharePoint worked.
I have SharePoint Online through Office 365. I like SharePoint's blogging layout, but the only problem that I found eventually was that you can't share your blog publicly without have users create login.
My solution, install it on my home server running Windows 2016 and Kasperky Endpoint Security. So, I created a VM with Windows 2016 installed ShapePoint. Had everything setup and went a couple days, all good. I checked the Kasperky log and notice a high alert item that said (forgot name of attack, but they were scanning folders on parallel systems). I looked at IP location, was somewhere in South America, and I said to myself, "Screw this, I don't know enough about Internet Security" and I shut down the studio... and went with blogger.
Moral of story, if you self-host, make sure you know what you are doing.
I think in this case it's overkill for what the OP wants.