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Comment by loxs | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic: can someone explain what is it that is so great about Medium, so that Steve finds it necessary to praise them? To me (as a reader) it's just a blog engine with horrible user experience. Of course, with time I have come to accept it as it is, so I don't get angry every time, but I still find it horrible.

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Publishing to the internet, particularly nicely formatted and with a nice editor, is still a pita. A big pita. Worse if you're Steve Yegge and anything you write can get a hundred thousand visitors.

I ran a wordpress blog for a while. What a godawful piece of shit that is. Security critical updates all the time, and HAHAHAHA, they regularly break themes. I have no idea why, but probably because wordpress refuses to create a nice them api so they can try and gpl every theme. Plus it's slow. Plus it's difficult to secure. I had originally used a hosted wp instance until that got repeatedly hacked. Then I ran it myself. Yuck.

Then I used octopress for a while. I had to configure nginx and ssl and then deal with things like figuring out why pygments broke. Something went wrong with python which obviously I'm using inside by ruby blog engine. Mathjax deprecated their cdn and I'm still too lazy to go fix it.

Medium, imo, creates a nice solution where (1) writing is pleasant, (2) publishing is easy and comes out nicely formatted, and (3) when you're busy, you spend the majority of your time writing instead of doing ancillary things.

You are comparing apples to pineapples. Medium does one thing, while WP, for better or for worse, does anything you want. WP is not just a blogging platform, it's a development stack.

Wordpress is a development stack that happens to have a Page/Post/Categories/Tags schema system. It is much more than a "blog."

It sounds like you didn't know how to secure your server with at least chroot jail, selective port filtering, and njinx injection filtering or apache fail2ban.

I have been running multiple wordpress sites for years and have never had issues. These sites have custom themes I wrote to take advantage of the wp_ apis, to do much more than just blogging.

For example: http://gregoryscoffee.com is done entirely as a custom wordpress theme. The different coffees are actually posts in the Coffees category - their thumbnail is fetched by grabbing the image attachment on each of the posts. In fact, all the dynamic content is stored as posts. The owner has no problem updating the site, since it is all editable in the normal wordpress admin.

> Wordpress is a development stack that happens to have a Page/Post/Categories/Tags schema system. It is much more than a "blog."

This discussion is about blogging, so IMO it's a valid comparison. While WP can be used for a whole bunch of other stuff, that doesn't change the fact that it's one of the most popular blogging platforms.

> It sounds like you didn't know how to secure your server with at least chroot jail, selective port filtering, and njinx injection filtering or apache fail2ban.

Well, I shouldn't need to know those things if all I really care about is blogging.

From a reader perspective (can't speak to distribution as the writer etc...), a Medium hosted post usually means that I'm not going to be bombarded with banners, ads, mailing lists etc.

I might immediately click out of it, but the barrier for me to click is lower initially.

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