I will continue writing blog posts here, but mainly, they will be published on Medium under the user @glegoux. The goal is always to improve the experience of readers and my experience of writing. The Medium platform is mature and becoming more and more popular, being one of the leaders among the editors of tech blogs now. It provides a full WYSIWYG user interface when editing online, with various formatting options provided as the user edits. It allows publishing blog posts (called stories) to capture large audiences and communities.
With the evolution of practices and tools of online blogging these last years, I wanted to cross a threshold in my tech writer experience: be more efficient and effective in writing content by allocating less time to maintain editor tools and more time to write content. So, I needed to choose between continuing to use only this blog, starting to use only Medium, using both, or something else. I chose to use both:
- The top and popular blog posts will be published on Medium in priority to gain visibility
- While the other ones will remain on this blog.
After evaluating the market of online editors and testing Medium, here are the pros and cons of using Medium vs. my blog:
| ✅ Pros | ❌ Cons |
|---|---|
|
• Medium editor is quicker and handier in updating a post with simple assets like text and images, more intuitive than YAFIYGI, and with instant updates without delay during the deployment of new content with Jekyll • Medium has advanced features of collaboration with co-writers, claps, peer comments, and followers, not available on my blog • Medium decorates the post with an estimation of reading, no need to fill manually, and the listen generation is not available on my blog • Medium offers stats with custom metrics (reads, etc.) for each story more relevant than using Google Analytics |
• Medium has partial propriety of the written content and limits the number of readings for non-members while my blog is open • The Medium content has a pre-defined style of design. It is not highly customizable like the content on my blog • The Medium features remain less advanced in pushing varied content like dynamic technical diagrams and mathematics formulae, while some workarounds exist |
For all these reasons, the right choice is a consensus by keeping the best of these 2 worlds. Also, I prefer remaining independent for the long term, and https://glegoux.com is not only a tech blog but a hub of centralized online activities.
Don’t worry, and I am going to keep maintaining this website and the open-source template behind it. To avoid all breaking changes, the past blog posts will remain accessible without breaking their web links.
However, it seems difficult to synchronize the content between Medium and this blog bi-directionally. I can import a post to Medium by copying the link manually, but exporting from Medium is long and tedious. The synchronization in case of updating a blog post from Medium becomes a nightmare to maintain. In contrast, I want to use Medium editor more, which is quicker and more handy. So, as I explained, I foresee that some articles will be only on Medium and others only on this blog. If necessary, if I want to have one at both locations, instead of having a full post everywhere, I will use web links between them, with a partial post redirecting to the full post (to avoid divergences and too heavy maintenance in case of multiple post-editions).
🙏 Thanks for your understanding and your readings.
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