Creating my own blog site instead of using Medium
Experience on Medium as a reader
Medium has been really good for me when I started learning more about Design. There were a lot of good articles for beginners level. But lately, I find less and less interesting things there.
- You can highlight part of an article or make notes. I don’t use this that much, but it’s quite handy when you want to come back to an article and look for a specific part.
- When you read a lot, you reach the limit of articles you can read pretty quickly, so you have to subscribe. It’s not super expensive but still…
- To avoid that to others, when you share a link to your Medium story — as a writer, you can share a friend link, which I try to always do when I post links to my stories.
- There are a lot of good articles but quite a lot of bad ones too … anyone can write there, so it’s to be expected.
- You get emails about ‘stories for you’ … I use this less and less and quite a lot are actually really not for me in fact. Example with this morning Medium Daily Digest email:
Anyone who knows me, will realise that this has never ever been on my to-do list ;-)
Or this one:
Experience on Medium as a writer
I have a lot of good things to say as a writer:
- it’s easy to use
- easy to edit on the go on your mobile (when I realise I’ve left a typo for example)
- you get people following you and you reach readers you might never had reached otherwise
- you get statistics on how many people read you, or view your articles
But:
- if Medium is down or disappear, so does your articles
- you’re limited to what you can do as the style is very basic and not customisable
- if you don’t subscribe anymore, you can lose access to your own stories
It’s not very accessible
Lots of people boycott Medium because it has been known to refuse to address accessibility issues.
Last year, they finally introduced a way to create an alt text for pictures ( = a description of the picture, read by screen readers), but there is more to be done and it doesn’t seem to be a priority for them at all.
So … creating my blog
I’ve been thinking about it for a while and started during the holidays. Using Wordpress as it’s easier to manage.
It’s not that easy though to make it accessible and performant. It depends on the Wordpress theme you chose and the plugins you add to it. I’m still working on it. Wordpress has it’s own limitations.
But it’s better. Here is a comparison of a Google Chrome Dev Tools audit on an article on my blog and on Medium:
There is quite a jump on the performance side: 93% on the blog vs 27% on Medium and the accessibility is better too.
This also avoids cookies from Medium:
What’s next
I’ll keep adding my previous Medium stories to my blog, and will create new ones there now instead of Medium.
I’ve added a potential email subscription functionality. It’s a plugin. It looks ok but do let me know if it’s invasive or if you have any problem with it.
Happy for feedback good and bad!
