I’ve been blogging since 2004 on shinyidol.com, and it has been great moving from platform to platform. Starting out editing raw HTML, moving to Contribute, then going to b2, before ending up on Wordpress. I’ve had my ups and downs with hosts and performance issues running on Wordpress, but always enjoyed the ability to mess around with it, either creating my own plugins, widgets, or themes.

When I got the chance to start writing on Medium, I was very excited. The platform is strong and puts content above everything else, but more often than not I would get writers block when writing on Medium. The stress of competing with others made me second guess myself. I’d be worried about getting recommendations on things I wrote. I felt I had to contribute something important on the platform versus just express my thoughts. While I try not to make blogging a diary, I don’t want the pressure of writing an op-ed type piece where I’ll be judged by those that are far more passionate about writing. Medium felt like a club, and I was just a guest.

Writing is something I’ve had to work on and having a platform that made me nervous to write on defeated the purpose of the platform.

I thought about returning to my Wordpress blog, but Wordpress has evolved into a full featured CMS for better or worse. Being a full featured CMS, it has suffered in speed, especially on my webhost. While doing some research on forum software I found out about Ghost, a new blog platform built on Node.js. It is simple and clean, much like Medium, but it allows you to self host on your own server, which excited me. While early, Ghost does everything I need in a blog platform as well as doesn’t have the built-in content competition that Medium has.

While there are tons of amazing writers here on Medium, I’m going to be moving on. It just isn’t for me. You can read all my new posts over on shinyidol.us.