this is just a self-note (reason why I even left some TK’s there, which I might not even follow through) post to mark when I decided to start organizing this. triggered by a google search console team who warned me, when I migrated my website from squarespace into github pages, that I had too many (about 150) sudden 404 broken links. almost all of them were simply linking to blog posts.
you’ve been warned.
over the past 12 months or so I’ve been jumping around forum tools, from squarespace to discourse and jekyll and now trying medium, searching for an ideal tool. only to find out there is no such thing. still it looks like medium gets the closest to it (here’s a random interesting review)… there’s very good design, great commenting, unique features such as highlighting, enough versioning (called revision history) along with some (not true) backup options and, on top of it all, amazingly enough, it’s truly free. sure, they’re offering free plans for now and nobody knows for how long or how they will profit with all this… but worst case scenario, just backup and move on to the next great thing.
squarespace became expensive to me (since I get no profit from it), offers no versioning (TK blog post), no cool features and little commenting. wordpress, might be worth it to mention, is also, unlike most might believe, not free, even if there are free hosting options, and while it can offer everything else I’m looking for through plugins and customizations, it all comes at an increasingly expensive cost. good plugins are pricy, free hosting is never really free, then there’s maintenance and customization complex maintenance. I never really considered using it, also because as a developer I grew to dislike a lot of how it is done. reminds me too much of the microsoft way, trying to please all and being a big huge mess, from a technical view.
discourse turned out to be ugly for most viewers and I discovered the owners are a bit too much into censoring (TK blog post). not to say it’s also quite expensive to host (again, no profit there). I love everything else about it, and I’ll have to keep it for a longer while as a forum, until I can migrate everything somewhere else, but I want to stop using it as a blog mostly because of those 3 reasons alone.
finally jekyll, while simple enough and offering the best versioning plus backup, might be too simple as it offers no commenting and there’s probably the highest maintenance cost. by “commenting” I mean it in a really good way such as in forums and unlike blogger (yeah, my first blog was on blogger, and it still exists). we sure could easily add an external commenting like discourse or disqus, but I believe those promote a wrong social writing mindset for several little reasons.
I could go on and checklist up of each one of them, giving explanations for each item, like I’ve done before a few times, but I feel like that’s too much work for too little return. like my now dead will to translate everything I’m importing in medium into english. at least it got me to read my very oldest blog post (TK) back from 2006 which does bring me some interesting insights. proof that, for my own benefit, it’s actually a good idea to write crap I’m thinking right now for future reference. still…
next step: stop writing bad blog posts, such as this one.
feeling like I really need to start being more professional about it or simply stop. produced enough crap already.
