Why I Left Medium

http://kennethreitz.org/why-i-left-medium/

by jmduke • 13 years ago

258 167 13 years ago

generj• 13 years ago

I agree with the article; I haven't ever been comfortable ceding control of my personal website to a third-party. Inevitably conflicts of interest arise.

The great appeal of Medium is the potential of featured content being re-tweeted by thousands.

zmitri• 13 years ago

And even that is absolutely fleeting. You're probably better off writing it on your own and submitting to Hacker News as the potential reach is much greater.

briandear2• 13 years ago

Assuming your subject is relevant to HN. Not every dev is interested in tech blogging.

pydanny• 13 years ago

This sums up all the reasons why I never wanted to go to medium.

at-fates-hands• 13 years ago

I hope more people who have a greater pull then me continue to push the idea you can control your own content and it doesn't cost you your sanity.

A lot of companies like Medium were created to simplify things. In reality, you give up quite a bit of control of your content to them.

scott_karana• 13 years ago

I hope that for some people, Neocities is a useful alternative. :)

themodelplumber4• 13 years ago

There's a good amount of platform distrust with Neocities, too, in that it has the feel of a sandbox and gives off the scent of "may go through some awkward growing pains." But what a great idea. Hope it gains traction.

jjindev• 13 years ago

I think it's good to have a low-overhead method for infrequent writers (people who want to expand beyond their tweet on occasion). Medium seems a good name and place for that.

On the other hand, I can totally see why people who write frequently and think of their corpus as more than an auxiliary to twitter would want more.

MatthewPhillips5• 13 years ago

Two different parts of the brain conflicting. When I’m writing, I don’t want to be in code mode.

This is one of the reasons why I think static site generators are really in their infancy. He describes Pelican as "Jekyll for Python". This highlights what is wrong. You shouldn't have to decide on a tool based on what language it is written in; you shouldn't need to know what language it is written in.

A static site generator should have a very simple folder structure, something like:

draft/

published/

site/

templates/

That's it. You write markdown files in draft/ and move them to published/ when you're done. The generator runs as a daemon and spits out site/ No config files. No `bundle install` nonsense.

agentultra3• 13 years ago

Please make this happen.

Bonus points if it's agnostic to markup format.

frou_dh• 13 years ago

It's probably already been done several times over. There are tons of homemade static site generators languishing out there.

sneak3• 13 years ago

Please tell me you're kidding. This is already how 99% of static site generators work.

conroy• 13 years ago

Jekyll has support for drafts. Write your post in _drafts, and then move it to _posts when you are ready to publish.

minimaxir3• 13 years ago

Even better, Octopress in Jekyll allows you to simply add a published: false flag at the beginning of the post to label it as a draft.

glesica2• 13 years ago

The reason many people care about the language is because of the install method (at least that's been my issue). I don't use Ruby, so when I tried to use Octopress the other day I found myself installing a bunch of packages, then realizing that Debian's Ruby version is slightly too old (1.9.1 instead of 1.9.3), then trying to set up rvm or renv (or whatever), then giving up.

I write a lot of Python, so if it had been Python, I would have had the tools to properly install it, no problem.

This is the general problem with distributing "programs" with systems that are really better suited to distributing "libraries" (like gem, npm, and pip). If I am downloading a library, I must be writing code in the language, so it's no problem to expect me to have a reasonable tool chain set up. But if it's just a program that I'm going to run, I shouldn't have to have a language-specific package manager (let alone a rvm/virtualenv-type system) installed and configured.

tomku• 13 years ago

Debian (and Ubuntu) actually ships all of 1.9.x as 1.9.1, fwiw. On my Wheezy VPS, "ruby1.9.1" is actually 1.9.3p194, on Ubuntu 12.04.2 it's 1.9.3p0, on Squeeze it's 1.9.2p0. It's some kind of API compatibility thing that probably makes sense to the Debian Ruby packagers, but not necessarily to you or me.

joeyespo2• 13 years ago

This is what I was planning on doing with Gitpress [1]. It's Python-based, but you'd never know it unless you're making plugins for it.

[1] https://github.com/joeyespo/gitpress

MatthewPhillips5• 13 years ago

I like what I see, why did you stop working on it?

superchink• 13 years ago

You might want to look at something like Prose (http://prose.io/#about). It aims to provide the convenience of CMS/blogging platforms like Wordpress for static site generators.

rattray• 13 years ago

This approach wasn't quite good enough for me. Even markdown -- for that matter, anything in a text editor -- still feels like "code mode" to me.

My solution was to make an open-source cms with google docs as the editor. I can manage my site from docblogger.org, use the fantastic google docs editor as my wyswig, and can edit the code to do whatever I want, whenever I want.

Code's at https://bitbucket.org/rattray/acvte/ and the interface is at docblogger.org for anyone interested. Very little activity/use so far, though.

wpietri4• 13 years ago

Nah. If you want it to be that simple, then you'd just use a hosted Wordpress. Static site generators are for people who like to tinker. Or at least have the option of tinkering. I use Jekyll because I want to know then when I need to do something different than they expected, I can make it happen without inordinate fucking around.

jkaunisv1• 13 years ago

There's a whole lot of space between hosted Wordpress and hacking on Jekyll. Not that hacking on Jekyll is hard, but there is something to be said for a more portable and easily installable/cross-platform solution. For example if my dad wanted to start blogging I wouldn't want to point him to Wordpress, but there's no way he'll dive into Jekyll.

krapp• 13 years ago

It could be doable possibly with a microframework that's optimized to cache views into a public directory the .htaccess checks first, before passing requests to the framework. Toss in a simple web-based CMS and a frontend for Composer (mumble mumble profit.)

I'm ashamed to admit i've been working on something along these lines off and on for a while but have nothing brilliant to show for my efforts. But the basic idea is entirely possible.

PuerkitoBio• 13 years ago

That's basically what I've done with [trofaf][0]. 3 subdirectories:

posts/

public/

templates/

Posts without valid YAML front matter are ignored (drafts, for example), and the few options available are on the command line, no config file. I run it with upstart and it watches the posts/ and templates/ directories for changes, rebuilds as needed. Pretty much the simplest still-useful static site generator I could think of. Fits my needs anyway.

[0] https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/trofaf

rsobers• 13 years ago

I'm sorry but saying you felt "dead inside" because of your blogging platform choice is a bit too much hyperbole for me.

That said, I'd never give my content to a platform like Medium. I happen to like the "writing experience" of Gist, but there's this thing called copy/paste which makes it easy to get the content over to WordPress when I'm done.

echohack2• 13 years ago

I think what it comes down to is that people are scared that Medium is going to use their license to steal all your content. Their license is weird: It says it allows them to make derivative works with your content, but at the same time it says it allows you to retain ownership of your content. What does that mean? Nobody knows.

I think if Medium just clarified that one line in their license it would make everyone's fears go away.

gohrt• 13 years ago

It means the same thing that this license means everywhere else: Medium can do whatever they want with your submission, and so can you.

derekp7• 13 years ago

It is standard CYA terms to keep them from getting sued by their users whenever they decide to change the site in such a way that displays your content in a different manner than what you expected.

3stripe2• 13 years ago

They are just words. Surely anything Medium does with them is going to promote the author also?

3stripe2• 13 years ago

I don't see Medium as an all or nothing platform.

No-one is forcing anyone to post ALL of a person's writing there.

Personally I see Medium as an extension of my publishing options, so I've retained my own blog whilst occasionally posting selected articles on Medium.

This seems to chime better with the whole concept of collections or buckets of content on Medium.

It is subject first rather than author first.

Which perhaps explains why so many of the "essential" parts from other services are missing.

mathattack• 13 years ago

Medium doesn't seem to be for everyone. It does seem to simplify things for some readers though, if at the expense of many writers.

knes• 13 years ago

Well that didn't took long to see those kind of article pop up....

codereflection• 13 years ago

This is just a case of choosing something before making sure that it meets all of your requirements. I'm sure that we've all been there in one form or another. I certainly have been, more often than I'd like to admit. ;)

DanielBMarkham• 13 years ago

The Great Internet Scam: tricking people into taking their time to create content for your web property, thereby increasing the value of your property. We've seen one major application after another go down this same road.

oakaz2• 13 years ago

I love Medium as a guy who used Jekyll for years. It was a huge waste of time. And if I ever spend even 10 more minutes on creating a dummy blog again, I'll ask 10 dudes to beat me with sticks.

themodelplumber4• 13 years ago

What was a waste of time about using Jekyll? How much time was wasted? And what is a "dummy" blog? I've never used Jekyll, just curious.

oakaz2• 13 years ago

go read about jekyll you are on internet

minimaxir3• 13 years ago

It's not just a matter of platform customization, it's a matter of identity. Who remembers the author of a Medium article after one finishes reading?

Macuyiko2• 13 years ago

Exactly! In fact, Marco -- which the author refers to -- has also been telling this. Since 2011, in fact: http://www.marco.org/2011/07/11/own-your-identity

After a month of struggling between Blogger's brain-dead, non-Markup, stuck-in-2001's editor and contemplating a complete switch to Medium, I also decided to just go with a simpler, static blog (running on a stripped down Pelican). As coincidence would have it, I just decided to put up some random thoughts about this today as well: http://blog.macuyiko.com/post/2013/pelican-switch-follow-up....

freework• 13 years ago

For a long time I thought medium.com was the blog of one single ambitions, epic tech blog writer.

btipling• 13 years ago

For what it's worth Medium has a really top notch team, and they are still iterating and exploring. This feedback will probably be valuable to them. I have found the Medium UI to be very good.

webwanderings• 13 years ago

I thought Medium was a platform which you write for. You don't become Medium platform. They are running it like an editorialized magazine. Your articles are promoted by the platform and not just by yourself. So why not maintain your own blog and write for others as well?

voyou2• 13 years ago

"They are running it like an editorialized magazine."

This is the odd thing about Medium - it's a bit like an editorialized magazine but with no editorial line or identity. If I want to read people writing about academic arts and humanities topics for a non-academic audience, I might go read the London Review of Books; if I want to read extensively researched but also personal essays, I'll read the New Yorker. If I read Medium I get - what? Some stuff written by people on the internet that some other people on the internet thought was good?

lowglow• 13 years ago

Is medium trying to compete with wordpress? Maybe the simplicity is its beauty. Not many people care for all the bells and whistles that you can dig into with wordpress.

I agree that if you're thinking about analytics, etc then you've probably outgrown these simple platforms. In this case you should definitely consider running your own install because now it's your business, and not just a journal.

minimaxir3• 13 years ago

Medium is both a promotion brand and a platform; Wordpress is mostly just a platform.

The better analogy would be http://tryghost.org and Wordpress.

voyou2• 13 years ago

Ugh, that looked good until I got to the bit about using Markdown. I'm not using a vt100 terminal, for gods sake, I can handle an editing system that understands basic formatting.

the906• 13 years ago

Is there a way to automate your own personal site to update a medium post? I've looked at Medium and while it is visually nice and laid out well, it seems very "cs student who just graduated college and wanted to make a start-up".

Macuyiko2• 13 years ago

That would be interesting, but I don't think it's on Medium's list of priorities at the moment. Maybe it's time for an unofficial API?

slig• 13 years ago

I thought HN decided couple of months ago with the whole posterous thing to never, ever, trust a third part to host you blog for free.

How long until twitter buys Medium and decides to shut everything down?

unknownian• 13 years ago

How long until twitter buys Medium and decides to shut everything down?

You should look up who runs Medium.

dwhly• 13 years ago

How long till x buys Medium and/or it goes out of business and decides to shut everything down, like Posterous, et al?

jgrahamc3• 13 years ago

It's weird to me that people need all these amazing tools to just write stuff. I typically write things in emacs text mode buffers because I'm writing words and don't need any bells and whistles.

Almost all of The Geek Atlas was written like that and then pasted into whatever thing O'Reilly wanted me to create XML with.

joshdance• 13 years ago

Some people might say it's weird that people write in emacs. :) To each his own.

jgrahamc3• 13 years ago

Sure, but an emacs text buffer is pretty stripped down; that was my real point.

eshvk3• 13 years ago

I dunno. I personally like writing on vim or on paper. However, there is a reason I feel more expressive. It is the very nature of these specific tools. I really like vim as much as I really like writing on moleskine. So I understand when people say the medium in which they portray stuff is important for them.

rickyc091• 13 years ago

Well, I think it's also partly about being part of the medium network and having your writing surface for others to see.

rhizome• 13 years ago

And people denigrate portals...

antitrust• 13 years ago

I think his point was that the writing was fine, but control over the web publishing portion was not.

As far as writing goes, I think a lot of us work in text editors. They're more responsive and stable than word processors.

mbesto2• 13 years ago

It's a syndrome of "blaming the tool". Writing is hard. Not because it's actually hard to physically write words, but because it's hard to stop yourself from thinking your writing is bad. So, naturally we blame our tools when we get frustrated with our writing.

This is the same for website templates, IDEs, to-do lists, etc.

I wrote about this awhile back: http://www.techdisruptive.com/2012/06/29/the-cyclical-nature...

sillysaurus• 13 years ago

This seems like a good opportunity for me to solicit some advice, if I may:

My writing is bad. Do you have any recommendations for how I could improve?

Better question: Would you mind describing what your own path was like going from "I'm a bad writer" to "Hey, I'm fairly good"?

My lack of writing skill has bothered me quite a lot over the last year or so. I've sent emails to various HNers asking that question, "What did your path from beginner to master look like?" but no one responds. (... Perhaps I didn't write the email very well...) :)

I have a lot I'd like to write about, but expressing myself well turns out to be the hard part for me. If I can figure out how to do that, then I think people will find the topics interesting. But I'm finding it very difficult because I'm a complete beginner. I've never written any long articles/essays/books before.

Thank you for your time!

EDIT: Here's something specific: I'd like to get better at using metaphor. I'm finding that even though I've been writing a lot, I seem to have reached a "plateau" of quality. It's.. well, it's just dull. I don't use many metaphors, and I know my writing comes off as very dry. So I'd like to get better at whatever skill or mindset that lets me spice up my writing, rather than my writing plodding dutifully along its lackluster course without any flair in presentation. Has anyone else found themselves in a similar situation? How'd you overcome it?

EDIT2: Thank you for the great responses!

reinhardt2• 13 years ago

Did you read the post? His problem was not "writing words", in fact he actually recommends medium if that's all you want: "Medium really is a great platform if you just want to write. Unfortunately, for me, that just wasn’t my problem."

larrys• 13 years ago

"It's weird to me that people need all these amazing tools to just write stuff."

Agree but have to say that when Pagemaker 1.0 came out on the Mac (might have been 512k) some people that I worked with talked about the creativity that just flowed. I think it was a mania induced by having the ability to see on the page the final product and what it looked like as opposed to just the words which someone else would typeset. (In other words to repeat the "high" created added to the creativity). Was hooked up to a Linotronic for camera ready copy.

gms• 13 years ago

Did you add all the XML tags after the text was written, or during?

jgrahamc3• 13 years ago

After. There wasn't much to add just some indication that "this is a header" etc.

msutherl2• 13 years ago

I really like the idea of writing in a text editor, and have tried to do so many times in Vim, but for some reason it's very important for me to see the result as it will appear to the reader as I'm writing. I don't know why this is, it just happens. When I'm in a WYSIWYG word processor with the typography mostly figured out, everything goes smoothly.

Likewise, when I write a post on web forums, Facebook, HN, etc., I need to publish it first before I can properly edit. Seeing the post in context is somehow important.

philsnow• 13 years ago

You can very likely wire that up, if you've got a bee in your bonnet to do so.

When I was editing latex files regularly, I had an environment something like

    $ make output.pdf
    $ xpdf -remote projectname output.pdf & while inotifywait -e modify **/* ; do make output.pdf; xpdf -remote projectname -reload; done

Then any time I changed a figure or a tex file or an embedded screenshot or whatever (any transitive dependency of output.pdf), make would rebuild it and display the result. xpdf nicely does not change the scroll position (even a little bit), so this gave me a rather nice nearly-real-time WYSIWYG view.

My $EDITOR at the time was vim and it never entered my head to try to contrive automatic saving every time I paused typing or something like that, but that seems like a fun idea.

praptak• 13 years ago

I am the total opposite. Seeing the result as I write feels just annoyingly distracting. The unpredictability of the jump to the next line is what I dislike the most.

Obviously I do look at the final formatting and possibly tweak it, just not at the same time I edit the text.

Obvious disclaimer: I do not think that this is "better", I'm just providing a different data point.

paperwork• 13 years ago

is there a blog framework/platform specifically for developers? I want to show code samples with syntax highlighting (and possibly the ability to actually run the sample code)? is there something which lets me embed d3.js charts? i've looked at pelican, jekyll, etc. but i want something simpler.

hpaavola• 13 years ago

For automatic syntax highlighting http://softwaremaniacs.org/soft/highlight/en/ is excellent.

codezero• 13 years ago

For a lot of people, the allure of Medium isn't the tools or tracking, it's the audience and distribution. If you already have an audience then a place like Medium will do very little for you.

jwmoz• 13 years ago

I don't understand why you wouldn't have considered all those bullet points before moving to a new platform.

jusben1369• 13 years ago

"I have more than words to organize but want something that manages all that so I don't get distracted coding now my traffic is dying and I'm helpless to stop that and it turns out I changed to a service that only manages words well"

I feel like this could have perhaps done with another draft/iteration to tighten up the goal of the article.

pavs3• 13 years ago

The concept of spending your time on writing things that you are obviously very passionate about on someone's else's platform so that guy can make money off of your writing seems so silly to me. Specially among people who are supposedly tech savvy.

Just spend 5 bucks a month and less than 45 minutes of initial setup, you can have your own blog and have 100% control over whatever the hell you want to do.

People who can't do that, should probably use yet-another-blogging-platform like Medium.

dxm• 13 years ago

Medium is providing a service with the expectation of making money, if a user is a decent writer then there is the potential of further opportunities being presented to the user. Medium (and Wordpress, and other similar platforms) are providing the user with value, it's not entirely one-way.

I'm tech savvy (B.Sc. Artificial Intelligence and Applied Mathematics, Computer Programmer working full-time for 8 years since University) and I choose to use Medium because I don't want to manage my own personal server, or buy domain names, or have recurring expenses, or have to fiddle with configuration files, or hack templates. Simplicity means the world.

Saying that; I agree with you (in that people contributing their data to platforms for the profit of others is silly.) Facebook is something I don't use because I don't see what I can get back from it that I can't already get from text messages or face-to-face interaction. Medium at least offers me something in exchange for contribution.

dasil0032• 13 years ago

Your last point is interesting because I feel the exact opposite. Facebook I don't have a problem with because I just post throwaway stuff on their anyway, and all my RL friends so they actually have a better chance of seeing it vs on my blog or twitter or whatever.

But Medium feels like it's taking the part of my online presence that I want to be most unique and commoditize it into this mass website that will only ever make the founders of the site famous. I know that sounds extreme because they do provide you with a great tool and some means of exposure you wouldn't otherwise have, but it just feels so dehumanizing somehow. Like it's taking the very best part of the internet and attempting to privatize for the benefit of some heavy-hitters in the silicon valley old boys network. And I think I put my finger on something with that last bit, because Medium is really kind of the same thing as Tumblr which never bothered me; maybe because it didn't have that patina of tech insider design perfection bestowed upon us in private beta as if from the gods themselves.

pavs3• 13 years ago

I don't know what fiddling with configuration file and maintenance you are talking about. It took me less than 1 hour to setup my wordpress blog on a vps. Other than the occasional plugin and wordpress update, which literally is just a button press away and take 30 seconds, what other server/blog maintenance you have to do?

In the last 3 months, I didn't even log in to my server, it has automatic backup setup and basic security taken care of during initial setup. I spent less than 3 minutes in the last 3 months for occasional plugin updates.

If you are talking about customization, than it is not any different than spending time customization blog on someone else's platform.

If you don't have 3 minutes in 3 months and 1 hour of initial setup time than you have other problems.

fc22• 13 years ago

Is it so hard to believe that some people just want to share their thoughts with the world and don't care about profit or building their personal brand?

pavs3• 13 years ago

I am not talking about building personal brand, not sure how you came up with that, nor am I talking about profit. Medium and other blogging platforms are content firm, basically you are working for them, under the guise of simplicity and they are (or will be) making money off of your writing.

This is stupid.

plg2• 13 years ago

what the heck is Medium

jordanmoore_• 13 years ago

http://bit.ly/167W0io

plg2• 13 years ago

;) thanks

I guess my attempt at irony failed

(again)

donnfelker• 13 years ago

The authors sentiments about why he disliked Medium are the exact reasons I've not moved over there yet. My concerns center around building an audience and being able to stay in contact with them. How am I supposed to give away an email course with in post marketing through drip campaigns in Medium? I can't. I cant customize the sidebar to let someone know about a related post that may also have some effect on their life. Just doesn't work. Medium sounds cool but it just feels half baked to me at this point. I dunno ... maybe that will change.

lmm• 13 years ago

I genuinely can't tell if you're serious.

Medium succeeds because it offers the best reading experience. If it's harder to market there than a traditional blog, that's a feature.

themodelplumber4• 13 years ago

Exactly. Once you get any sort of marketing itch, or design itch (wait until the next set of trends really hit home and Medium is caught out), or IA or UX itch, you are going to wonder how much you could have done on your own by now.

ippa• 13 years ago

One of the reasons I never started blogged seriously is something like this. It's a very silly reason, I dev alot, I have ideas for blogposts.. but I just never could decide on a platform.

I don't like the idea of a hosted blogplatform, for some of the reasons Kenneth didn't.

I refuse to run Wordpress due to it's security history and upgrade hell. I know, there's security issues with everything.. except for maybe a static site with jekyll or something :). It's just that ages ago I thought that Wordpress was a silver bullet making various sites and I got bitten by it.

I never found a polished ruby/rails blog app. I've searched, maybe not lately. Has this changed?

A static site generator writing blog posts with git never excited me much, I like a kickass RTE.

The idea of doing my own blog comes up now and then but I haven't acted on it yet.

What options are there out there besides PHP? Preferable ruby/sinatra/rails over django.

kenneth_reitz4• 13 years ago

Using a service like PagodaBox helps a lot with the security issues. The filesystem for everything but uploads is read-only.

ronnix• 13 years ago

Why not Heroku in this case?

smacktoward• 13 years ago

Words written on a crappy platform always beat words not written on a beautiful one. Don't get too hung up on the question of tools, or you'll spend all your time looking at tools and none of it writing.

A static site generator writing blog posts with git never excited me much, I like a kickass RTE.

Ironically this is a good description of the original "static site generator", Movable Type: http://www.movabletype.com/

It has a dynamic backend (written in Perl, which some people find a turnoff, but unless you're hacking the software itself I can't imagine why) with a nice RTE available for editing, but in its default configuration all its output is simple easy-to-serve static files.

eropple3• 13 years ago

I refuse to run Wordpress due to it's security history and upgrade hell.

Your call, but IMO this is pretty short-sighted and reliant on outdated information. WordPress has put a lot of effort into application security and has improved considerably over the last few years. The "upgrade hell" days are essentially over; I've upgraded one blog from early 2.x to the current 3.5.2 release without a single broken plugin.

It's much like another PHP project, phpBB; I'd never have used phpBB2 but phpBB3 is a really pleasant tool.

viennacoder• 13 years ago

Check out obtvse2 on github. It's got several themes with a clean look.

axblount• 13 years ago

I can understand why the OP dislikes the homogeneity. But from a reader perspective, I don't mind it at all. There's nothing to distract from the post. It's just one simple battle-tested design. No cover to judge the book by.

I felt dead inside.

Thanks for the hearty chuckle!

furilo• 13 years ago

And you could not have been aware of all those things before moving to Medium?

waynepan• 13 years ago

Why not post to both?

briandear2• 13 years ago

Apparently, I'm not cool enough to be invited to medium. If anyone has any pull..

espeed3• 13 years ago

Recommend a post and interact with the site, and then one day you'll notice you have the opportunity to do more.

kenneth_reitz4• 13 years ago

Ask someone with an account to let you comment on one of their drafts before they publish it.

Boom, you have an account.

will_lam• 13 years ago

I never quite understood the fascination with medium.. it's cool and all, but I'd rather invest in my own "platform" as Marco had put it and control everything with respect to my brand, content and tweak anything and everything to my heart's desire.

cpeterso• 13 years ago

I wonder how his temporary "HTTP 301 Moved Permanently" redirect to medium.com affects his resurrected blog's search engine placement.

kenneth_reitz4• 13 years ago

It wasn't pretty. Not the end of the world, though.

ereckers• 13 years ago

One reason for the popularity of WordPress especially the self hosted version, "spaghetti" and all, is that many people have already learned that lesson. It's your content, put it on your domain and do with it what you will. Forget enriching a network.

ricardobeat• 13 years ago

To lazily prevent link-rot, I setup a simple blanket 301 redirect from the old domain to my profile on Medium. Things felt right

That doesn't prevent link rot at all.

301 is a permanent redirect, the old links will end up being replaced and killed one by one, since they all redirect to the same content. And to top it off, now that he's stopped using Medium his profile might simply disappear one day.

MarlonPro2• 13 years ago

@kenneth I saw that you are using Midori Traveler's Notebook. I'm just wondering how are you actually use it. I own the regular traveler's notebook myself. But it's still empty right now. I see a lot of people using it as journal, sketch notebook, etc. but I'm not one of those creative type. How are you using it? How do you decide which items go to it vs not. Thanks!

kenneth_reitz4• 13 years ago

I basically use it as an idea sketchpad for brainstorming. I keep a book of the thin blank pages in it, as well as one squared. The squared goes mostly unused, but it's useful for writing down visual ideas for websites and such.

Hope that helps ;)

elnate• 13 years ago

As a reader, my main complaint with medium is space bar scroll not working. I never realised how big of a part of my workflow it was until it stopped.

joeblau2• 13 years ago

I'm on Medium, but truthfully I'm waiting for Ghost.

jeswin2• 13 years ago

Can we ping you to be a tester once we are online? :) It will look like this - http://flipper.foraproject.org

We'll have the same writing experience as Medium, with markdown support, custom domains and an OSS license. You basically post into various forums, which you can moderate.

joeblau2• 13 years ago

Maybe. How is the hosting handled by your project? One of the things I'm looking forward to on Ghost is the ability to hack on their dashboard. I'm asking about the hosting as well because I want to have the power to host my blog on my own servers.

maxwin• 13 years ago

The post is more about why one should join medium...

john_butts• 13 years ago

There is a constant problem where I mouse over a link and see only medium dot com. It's a contextual stripping in a marketplace that pretty explicitly judges you on the unique ribbons in your hair.

targusman• 13 years ago

He's got an affiliate link in the article. He is so greedy.

rony1986• 13 years ago

i wrote a blog on this http://www.ronyjacob.com/day/2013/08/01

Why I Left Medium

Related Stories