FUCK MEDIUM LOL
Hey! This post was intentionally delisted for being boring, inaccurate, outdated, or any combination of the three. I've left it up for archival purposes, but keep the context in mind!
You have changed blog software 3 times, it’s time to stop pretending it was a principled decision.
Continue at your own risk!
The Medium editor is a gigantic piece of shit, which is something I noticed approximately 3 milliseconds after opening it for the first time. Everything is done through the mouse, save a handful of half-assed formatting toggles that are almost staggeringly good at picking the least intuitive behavior. The site constantly tries to fight your styling and impose its own, down to the kind of dashes you use. The inclusion of somewhat graceful image captioning is really the only positive thing I can say about it.
With the upcoming rumbles of Medium launching a subscription service, now seems like a pretty excellent time for me to get the fuck out and never look back. So I switched to Ghost, a pretty-fucking-solid self-hosted publishing service. It takes Markdown and Handlebars templates, runs them through the magic of Node, and spits out static pages with no unnecessary bullshit. Unless your theme includes unnecessary bullshit. Did I mention I had to write a theme from scratch?
While I was doing that, I guess this turned into my new landing page. If I’m going to have my personal domain direct people to a whole bunch of other bullshit services, I may as well offer something on the site itself.
So yeah. This is now a thing, much to my surprise. It already feels way more comfortable writing here than Medium ever did, so I went ahead and migrated most of what mattered from that account, and I’ll be closing it as soon as I can be assed to rip out the DNS records. Good riddance. The site is blinding white and uses screen space horribly wastefully.
As long as I’m griping about Medium, the Android app is like getting a root canal from an 18-wheeler. I played around with Quill for a while, and it’s a pretty solid way to write from bed—or while I’m out and about, if I ever decide to leave the apartment again. Unfortunately, I can’t upload straight to Ghost from Sublime Text, so there’s a small extra step if I want to use that editor, but honestly? Aside from the blinding white, the web editor isn’t that bad, and it has the obligatory Electron wrapper if I ever feel like giving it its own desktop icon.
Of course, I’ve once again memed myself into dealing with more technological bullshit. I love working with computers, but I generally hate fighting other peoples' software, and Ghost’s own Wonderful Quirks will probably reveal themselves in due time. Plus I’m going to end up obsessing about tags for the next 500,000 years. But for now, I’m pretty content—though I do have to get to work repointing the rest of the site once I’m done with this.
