Making the switch from Medium to this blog

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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:

screenshot of one on the story on offer: "How I completely transformed my body in one year"

Anyone who knows me, will realise that this has never ever been on my to-do list 😉

Or this one:

screenshot of another suggested story "I Knew I Had To Breakup With Him When I Opened His Gift"

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 have 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

bold, italics, creating a link, big heading, small heading, two styles of quotes

if you don’t subscribe anymore, you can lose access to your own stories

screenshot of a tweet where someone says he can't access to what he wrote anymore - He is not a subscriber anymore — Link to the tweet

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. See my post about using WordPress for this blog.

But it’s better. Here is a comparison of a Google Chrome Dev Tools audit on an article on my blog and on Medium: