I’m moving my blog to Medium

This has been a real struggle for me, as I know it has been for others as well, often leading to different conclusions, often for good reasons, and often for bad reasons. I have maintained my own blog, hosted on my own site gummihaf.com, for quite some time now. I’m not the most active writer, but it’s an outlet for my thoughts (and sometimes frustrations) and I want to believe that some of the stuff I write about can be helpful or informative to at least someone out there.

So why am I switching from my own blog to Medium? Like any task that is mundane and insignificant, I’ve spent way too much time thinking about this, and have come up with a far too involved reasoning for something that nobody should really care about.

The blog gave me a sense of ownership. I manage the computer it’s running on, I get to upgrade WordPress every now and then (or pretty much every time I log in), and I can change the layout of the site whenever I want to. However, I’m slowly realizing that blogging isn’t about owning a space on the Internet. It’s about expression, and the easier it is to express your thoughts, the more you’ll do it (or so I’ve convinced myself.) It’s true that Medium takes away some of the controls of a traditional blog, but when it comes to writing articles and making it easy to express your thoughts, it simply kicks ass.
Monetization. Hmmm… I’ve heard some people complain that you can’t monetize your content on Medium. I assume it’s true, and it might stay like that forever, but I have no interest in monetizing my content anyway, so this point is not important to me. I did think about it though, because that’s the whole point of this exercise.
The attention to details on Medium is just staggering, and something I truly appreciate. WordPress feels like my dad’s old Volvo next to Medium: outdated — and that doesn’t quite cover it, the WordPress editor is downright buggy. It will mess up paragraphs in different ways depending on the editing mode you’re in, it’s not consistent in applying style changes, and its handling of inline content is really bad. The fact that it even has editing modes baffles me; why on earth do I care what the HTML looks like? Well I do, but I shouldn’t have to… stop giving me options I shouldn’t care about!
Having my own blog allowed me to track all the statistics I could imagine, whether it’s through Google Analytics or whatever fancier tracking tool there is out there. The fact is though, beyond doing an occasional vanity check on the number of people hitting the site, I don’t really care that much about traffic, let alone knowing where the traffic came from, and running campaigns, and… you get where I’m going with this. Medium has a simple stats page which is Good Enough for me.

So with all those carefully thought out reasons, you can now continue with your life, feeling assured that this decision was made after way too much deliberation, and who knows, maybe I’ll move everything back in a month.