> 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.
In my opinion a personal blog or website on a personal domain is the most credible way to publish your ideas.
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.
A third party site is more likely to preserve your work in time than you remembering to pay and host your content.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That still leaves the question of how to handle site search and comments.
Right now, I am using a Notion website builder: 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/). Open-source and I’ve found the websites there have a far more modern-look.
That is also a Notion website builder, but more geared towards blogging.
This is an example site built with Notion + Feather
Disclaimer: I am the creator of feather.so