I’ve been using Medium for a long time both as a reader as well as a writer. Over time I came to dislike the experience more and more. Medium forces me as a reader into a direction I don’t want to go and there’s no way to settle this issue.
As a writer, the experience hasn’t really improved. As a reader I’m constantly fighting with popups because I won’t buy a subscription to read mostly content marketing articles and self promotion.
Example:
All this made me thinking to make a change. I’m planning to write more next year to drive some traffic on projects I’m currently working on. So I’ve looked around and decided to invest a few hours to setup a Gatsby + Netlify static site.
I’m using a starter theme which made it quite easy to get going. The site is quite minimal, gets top scores on lighthouse test and supports code highlighting etc.. I can write articles using Markdown, deployment takes a minute.
Gatsby comes with a rich set of plugins including disqus and Google Analytics as well as code highlighting. So far I’m pretty happy about the change.
Bonus points: I’ve always liked the developer experience with GraphQL and React. Gatsby gives me the opportunity to use both and make small adjustments to the templates.
What do you bloggers and readers think? Will you stick to Medium or do you use alternatives?