Why am I not using Medium?

While Wordpress is still extremely popular among internet bloggers, there seems to be one site that’s getting all the attention in the past few years now and that’s Medium. Setting up your blog on Medium is as simple as creating a Reddit account. Within minutes, you can be typing away at your computer about your recent vacation trip. You don’t need to know a thing about web development or any programming for that matter to create your blog. And your blog instantly has this beautiful, minimalistic, content-focused look. There is no need to spend hours scouring the internet for a decent theme like Wordpress users do. Actually, you cannot. Medium is nowhere near as customizable as Wordpress. But that’s okay since most people will love the default look of the site. And the best part, writing on Medium is completely free. You don’t need to pay a cent. The site has zero adverts. So what’s the catch? Well, you have to pay to be able to read what others on Medium write.

In other words, Medium is trying to be the Apple of the blogging industry. That’s certainly not a bad business model. Apple has proven that if a product looks flashy enough, people are willing to pay thousands of dollars to get their hands on it. Medium is proud to say they don’t serve ads. There is no Ad-supported version for people who can’t afford the membership and they simply cannot read some articles without paying. And I am not a fan of that business model even though it works. And hence I decided not to blog on Medium. I decided that if I ever did plan to blog I would build my site from scratch with the bit of HTML, CSS and Javascript knowledge I had and host it myself.

Recently, I stumbled upon the personal website of a professor and was immediately awe with how responsive, minimalistic and at the same time beautiful the page was. Thankfully the professor mentioned what technology the site was built on. And that was my introduction to Jekyll. Jekyll is a simple, blog aware static site generator that works very well with Github Pages. Not gonna lie, setting up this blog wasn’t exactly a smooth process. There will be lot of googling and code correction to do before your site finally renders the way you want it to.

Jekyll+Github Pages is certainly not the blogging platform for everyone. Most people will have a better time blogging on Wordpress or Medium. But if you are willing to put in some effort to set up your blog and aren’t completely intimidated by the thought of googling errors on StackOverflow and doing a bit of debugging, blogging on Jekyll can be so worth it.