Launching a new blog — here
I decided to use Medium.com
After some serious consideration the past few weeks, I’ve decided to start blogging again and decided to use Medium as my new platform.
People have all kinds of reasons for blogging. The origin of the word is a contraction of “web log”, which is closest to my objectives here. I want to start keeping a better diary.
There’s so much going on in my personal and professional life, especially my technical interests, that I want write about it more. Probably will be short dribbles here and there, rather than major essays.
To accomplish this, I need a platform that
- fits more than 140 characters,
- doesn’t require my readers to all be friends,
- has standard blogging features but not everything under the sun,
- is free for low volume traffic
In the past I’ve written and maintained my own blog app code. But over time, my old Rails blog, Vaporbase has gotten somewhat crufty. It uses an older version of the framework (3.2), is missing some key features I’d like to have, and to be honest, I dont feel like upgrading it.
This time around I considered some other options: WordPress, Tumblr, SquareSpace, Medium, and Ghost.
I don’t have a good relationship with WordPress. Multiple times I tried to give it the benefit of my doubt, but failed. I know web developers who swear by it. I left PHP as a programming language about ten years ago and don’t like it, but that’s not the only reason. The plethora of 3rd party plugins means there’s a great ecosystem around it, but I dont trust the quality of most of them and I’d need to invest more time than I want in it. I still have a couple sites I built and maintain in WordPress for non-profits I’ve helped, but plan to move them off the platform eventually.
Tumblr just feels old school. Not as old as WordPress, but still… I have an old Tumblr account but its idle. I did consider reviving it. Maybe I’m unfair?
I love SquareSpace and recommend it for non-technical sites, especially non-profits. I’ve built several non-profit sites using SquareSpace and the great thing is once its setup, I can hand the keys over to the organization’s content folks to maintain it. They’ll call me for technical questions but I ain’t no webmaster, thank you very much. But there’s a monthly fee, so I figured I’d avoid that for my personal use.
Then there’s Ghost. A relatively new player in the field (not version 1.0 yet). It’s open source (like WordPress) with hosted options. Its written in Node.js, which means its fresh, fast, and nimble. Its just for blogging. Nothing too fancy. I like the feel. But I’m too cheap to pay even $10/mo hosting on ghost.io or Amazon EC2.
Medium is interesting. It’s like a Twitter for bloggers. A community for writers, with lots of social sharing of posts feeds. The feeling is they really want serious writers though, indie authors, rather than rumble tumble diaries. I get it. But nonetheless I’m going with it too, for now.
