My Experience With Medium

It’s been about 3 months now since I switched over to Medium from Wordpress. Now that I have had a chance to experience it a bit I think I can provide a comparison between Medium and Wordpress.

Pros

• Simple, easy to use interface, almost never have to drill down menus looking for options
• Super easy to use editor, its basically blank and you only see what you write until you want to insert something, save or publish your post
• “Reads” statistics, this lets you see how many people that visit a specific post actually bother to scroll down or read it. It’s a useful way to determine if you are doing a good job of capturing the readers interest

Views column shows direct views in black and indirect (ex. RSS) views in gray

• Medium doesn’t do the stupid “” replacement with html character codes that Wordpress performs in code tags. This was one of the reasons I decided to leave Wordpress, the ability to disable the “feature” required paying
• Publications allow you to easily setup a system where members can submit posts that are displayed on a shared page
• Draft comments can be left by members of your publication and those you share the draft link with, allowing you to get feedback on stories before making them public
• Comments can leave tags on your article, allowing readers to easily reference sections that they are addressing

Notes that readers can leave behind for the author/publication

Notes are also visible in the comments, you can click on them to jump to the referenced portion of the post

• Great embedding support, I found it very easy to embed and format things into posts. Pictures, Twitter, Videos, its all pretty nice and easy
• Lack of plugins, strangely a good thing. One of the biggest detractors of Wordpress is the terrible nature of plugin developers (and users) to never address security issues. It’s extremely common for Wordpress sites to get breached due to insecure/not updated plugins

Cons

• Lack of syntax highlighting is super annoying on Medium. I have not looked for alternatives to the default code boxes but they are not that useful. Wordpress provided some great features in its code tags.
• Cannot really mess around with the blog theme, while the default looks fine it leaves something to be desired. I actually really liked the theme from my Wordpress blog as it was simple to navigate and just showed you the content you wanted to see.
• Medium definitely does not give you as much control of the blog as Wordpress did, however this wasn't as big as a con as it may seem. Most of the time I never used any of the fancy admin features Wordpress provided (mainly because you need to pay to use them)
• Does not seem to have as much help available online as Wordpress does, makes it tricky at times when I want to do something fancy and cannot determine if Medium actually supports the feature
• Medium does not allow you to leave notes for readers which can be frustrating when you don’t want to sidetrack the main content of the blog post

Overall I think I am happy with using Medium over Wordpress. It feels more slick to me and the editor is really easy to use. While some of the issues above do leave me wanting for the functionality I had in Wordpress, I think that Medium provides an overall better experience for writing.