This bold (or, rather odd) move is mainly driven by my frustration of maintaining my WordPress portfolio sites. One was down due to the recent WP update, and the other one was not accessible due to the plug-in security, which resulted in the site getting hacked. I’ve requested the hosting server to restore my sites with their backups, but for the one got hacked, they’ve informed me that I should “contact a web developer to assist you with removing the infected malicious contents”, which would be me. I have no idea how to remove them completely, so good luck to me with that!
As of today, these are the current states of my lovely sites:
I have been self-hosting my portfolios for more than more almost two decades, and the issues of the incompatibility between the PHP database, the plug-ins with the WordPress version updates, or the site being hacked due to the WordPress vulnerability had come up quite a few times.
As all of my sites are in the limp state, plus I’ve always hoped to utilize my Medium membership more, it seems natural that now is the time to make the move. While using Medium for design portfolio is somewhat hacky and not as flexible, the ease of the writing experience has helped me spot some of the small mistakes in my portfolio that were not as immediate visible in the WP editor. As a designer who has designed quite a few authoring tools, Medium has always been one of the inspirations. This is a great opportunity to heavy test this tool and learn from it with a real use case.
The first thing I noticed while copying over my work over was that this experience has forced me to write more details. I have to admit that I’m not as diligent or thorough as I should be when it comes to explaining my work. It’s time consuming, and l hardly have time to look into that, so I usually keep them to the very minimum, and rely on the designs to speak for themselves, which is definitely not the best practice for prepping the UX or product design portfolios. Knowing what I share here would be visible to the community, I feel “a little more obligated” to explain my work better. Maybe just a tiny bit, but it’s definitely an interesting shift of my mindset.
There are definitely some things that I’ve love to be able to do more easily, such as resizing the image, but the focus on the writing itself is definitely quite pleasant. I am intrigued to see where this platform would take me to next.
Thanks for the helpful articles from the following:
