Why I decided to keep my personal blog on Medium
What do Medium, Notion and iWeb all have in common when it comes to personal online presence?
I remember in 2019 when my dear friend Dragan asked me if it was smart giving away my content to Medium, as I don’t have anything to gain from that. He said it was much better to keep it on a self-hosted, personal website, aligned with my brand. Many of my colleagues share his sentiment.
And he did have a point. Medium can (and did) change unexpectedly, the layouts no longer look the same, we are getting spammed with paywalls, I’d be quite limited if i wanted to do SEO things or move away. It may disappear altogether. Years of content, just puf.
Colour me blue and call me Andy
Over the past weekend, I’ve felt a need to reinvent myself. You know, the kind of need that teenage girls feel when they break up with their boyfriend and color their hair blue. Ok, not nearly as dramatic, but jokes aside, I felt that my personal website deserved more attention.
I had this same feeling a couple of years ago, when I jumped ship from a static HTML website (and Wordpress before that) onto having Markdown files compiled with Jekyll and automatically hosted on Github Pages.
Back then, I tought to myself “how smart is that!” a 500 IQ move, where CI does all the work, and “I just use these 7 build tools” to make it happen. I’m not kidding, 7: Jekyll, GitHub Pages/Actions, SASS, custom Jekyll template, git, Cloudflare, Markdown. The reality of that is, however, that it was quite an un-elegant solution.
Every couple of months, I’d come in, open the repository, spend 30min figuring out how to write a new blogpost or make a change, then hope the CI still works, and hit the parts that don’t with a hammer.
Furthermore, Medium comes with the comments and annotations system, and regularly updates me on who read or clapped for the story. Yeah of course I could do all of that myself, but it would require juggling 5 more tools. It pushes you into writing more, introduces corrections over time, there is even a social aspect to it.
In a way, having the website/blog becomes a distraction from the act of actual writing. It gives you a way out, but is fundamentally unproductive.
When presented with an engineering dilemma Boris taught me to ask myself what route I’d take given unlimited money and time cheat codes. And to this day, I often use this advice with my own team.
It doesn’t give you an answer, instead it breaks the ice, removes constraints from the conversation and lets you dream about what the end goal is. Sometimes it just helps you understand WHY we are doing this feature in the first place. You start breaking down the ideal scenario into iterations and try to position your capabilities somewhere onto that axis.
So, this brings me to the final point. Given unlimited time and money, I wouldn’t change a thing here. I’d make it as effortless as possible to write and publish, hoping that it would lead me to come in here more often, even when I don’t have something super smart or thorough to talk about.
Today, I re-read my first post (Manifesto_) here from 2017. It was just some weeks prior to my joining Boris’ team at Catena Media. It was very optimistic about personal and professional growth I had anticipated, and it clearly states that I wanted to write about travel, ideas, solutions. To have discussions on here. To not care about SEO, personal branding or longevity of the content.
While all of that didn’t come to transpire, I still feel that Medium offers a better chance of that happening, than wrapping my own community solution.
Let’s go back to that. Let’s publish more, and think about publishing less.
