So we are back to running our own blogs again? What are the alternatives to Medium if you don’t want to self-host? Ghost?
With this particular image, there's virtually no DO configuration (just standard size / region settings which have smart defaults IIRC). You do have to SSH in, but the new Ghost 2.0 CLI handles updating Ghost much more smoothly than in the past. I've been happy with it personally.
Ghost 2.0 is definitely better than prior versions but still needs babysitting. As an infrequent blogger, I've found I am updating Ghost more frequently than I'm blogging.
Github pages or Gatsby (via something like Netlify) are much better suited to this problem because server config & SSL are handled and they're just serving static pages.
Solid platform, discoverability baked in, great writing tools. They do need to polish their UX though as I wrote a lengthy article for about an hour and then clicked on "Write a Post" instead of Save to publish. This wiped my editor clean with no way to recover what was lost. Horrible experience there.
They should at least autosave for you on every keystroke. No reason not to.
The thing that made Medium special was that anyone could post about something that mattered to them and get noticed no matter their background.
WordPress, Blogger, and other free things cost energy in place of money because they're top-heavy with features and weak accessibility. That's as much a blocker as a recurring charge.
[1] "But it's $70 if you pay the full year!"
That's not much of a deal for someone who's already wary about trusting a company with a direct line to cause a cascade of overdraft feeds.
The main reason why the web is such a sight for sore eyes in 2019 is that people seem to think $72 a year is a lot for having a voice. People can find 10x that for a new iPhone or spend that much on beer in a month or on a cable subscription but having a blog sure can't be worth much to most people.
For one thing, how much do they think their time is worth? That is 10 hours of time spent writing at around minimum wage in the U.S.
I don't get it. On the other hand, I don't understand how grandmothers spend $5 on acrylic yarn when they could spend $10 to make a (better) wool scarf that they'll spend 20 hours knitting. (e.g. the wool scarf will protect you in a fire, the acrylic scarf will melt, burn you, and produce toxic fumes.)
Sites like Medium though are a place where people go to experience networking effects. Thinking about it in the long term might be like buying into a year’s subscription of speed dating at the local bowling alley. It may be all the rage with all the types of people you want to be with this week, but what does next week bring? The hot speed dating activity might move somewhere else. Or the group of people you want to hang out with there might be replaced by a different group of people.
Years ago, Brad Cox (of Objective C fame) wrote a great essay on micropayments and the Internet. I can’t find it right now, but IIRC it talked about why micropayments might be the way to go to fund intenert related activities. Unfortunately, my observation of MBA business models is that they have never wrapped their heads around how to implement micropayment models that reach that happy point where consumers benefit as well as producers.
1. It only uses a narrow column for content. 2. No code highlighting or snippets embedding support
I actually help people with that for pay if you want assistance.
The code snippets are a real issue. I'm not sure how much code you could even show because I don't show code snippets on any of my blogs.
Maybe screenshots would work. It's also possible that writing it in the "compose" interface would work.
I usually write in the HTML interface, but I use the app on my phone. When I copy and paste, it shows up differently depending on which interface I'm using.
It's possible that blockquoting it in the compose interface and then adding HR tags top and bottom to help set it off would get you satisfactory results. You can also add custom CSS to any layout. This has allowed me to get effects not natively supported by the user-friendly customization options without digging around in the code per se, which I'm not confident enough to do. I know a little HTML and CSS, but not so much that I'm comfortable going directly into the code. I tried it once and couldn't figure out where the thing was that I wanted to edit.