Thoughts on Medium

Once upon a time I thought I’d start my personal blog. I thought I’d blog mostly on random tech stuff as a journal and then every now and then some “real life stuff” aka IRL. The reasoning was that I also found other tech people’s blogs fascinating. It showed me that they weren’t just a commit in a git repo, but that they had opinions, hobbies and dreams. I like that, and wanted the same. What I didn’t want to do was spend tons of time relearning HTML and CSS since the Web 2.0 world passed me by years ago.

Enter Jekyll

My blog happened some years ago. I started with a mess of Jekyll and some random crap on a cheap static site. The content was static, well, because why over complicate something I don’t want to build out?

The goal was to blog about once a month, and I’m pretty close to that. I would take a quick (I mean, REALLY quick) pass over each post to proofread it and there would inevitably be an embarrassingly high number of grammatical errors. But, I’d rather write and move on then perfect a single blog post. I’m an enginerd not a writer. Judge me on my accomplishments rather then my writing, I admit the writing sucks. Nobody is making anyone read it. :)

Markdown was handy but became really clumsy when it came to things like images and code blocks.

Image hosting has always been clumsy. I tried Imgur but had issues with too many images and not being sure of the fate of their service. Google Photos was more of the same. I didn’t really want to pay for an image gallery in this day and age. Hosting the images in git feels almost like a sin. Problem still unsolved.

I use pre-formatted code blocks quite often on the blog. Markdown provides an easy way to create pre-formmated text sections, but all the syntax highlighting is an addon. Github gists are handy, but now it depends on a third-party script hosting service and I don’t know if Google would run the javascript to embed the gist and use it drive traffic to my site. The gray area. I could bite the bullet and use jekyll + syntax highlighting, but I don’t want to learn that stuff. I just want to start with an idea, write, and finish.

Enter Medium

The other week I was looking at the simplest no B.S. way to get a blog running for OpenBike that my co-founder and I could use. I end up reading a ton of great content on Medium, and it’s simple to use. Done.

How about my personal blog? It’s dragging along. There is no social network or marketing around it. Maybe I should move that as well?

Why not? I don’t care much about the style, I just want to start writing and finish writing.

One big problem: my existing content. It doesn’t appear that I can import all my old blog posts and move it over to Medium. Strike 1.

Once the content is in Medium there appears to be a way to “Download a .zip file containing HTML files of your posts”. I’m sure they’ll be semi-molested.

I’m at this stalemate: To Medium or not Medium, that is the question.

Update

Cross-posted until I decide.