I'm sorry but saying you felt "dead inside" because of your blogging platform choice is a bit too much hyperbole for me.
That said, I'd never give my content to a platform like Medium. I happen to like the "writing experience" of Gist, but there's this thing called copy/paste which makes it easy to get the content over to WordPress when I'm done.
I think what it comes down to is that people are scared that Medium is going to use their license to steal all your content. Their license is weird: It says it allows them to make derivative works with your content, but at the same time it says it allows you to retain ownership of your content. What does that mean? Nobody knows.
I think if Medium just clarified that one line in their license it would make everyone's fears go away.
It is standard CYA terms to keep them from getting sued by their users whenever they decide to change the site in such a way that displays your content in a different manner than what you expected.
Every service you've ever signed up for that accepts user-generated/submitted content has a clause functionally identical to this.
Of course, every time someone reads one of those clauses they think it implies all sorts of evil, because reading comprehension is not a strong suit of the internet.
No-one is forcing anyone to post ALL of a person's writing there.
Personally I see Medium as an extension of my publishing options, so I've retained my own blog whilst occasionally posting selected articles on Medium.
This seems to chime better with the whole concept of collections or buckets of content on Medium.
It is subject first rather than author first.
Which perhaps explains why so many of the "essential" parts from other services are missing.
It's weird to me that people need all these amazing tools to just write stuff. I typically write things in emacs text mode buffers because I'm writing words and don't need any bells and whistles.
Almost all of The Geek Atlas was written like that and then pasted into whatever thing O'Reilly wanted me to create XML with.
Did you read the post? His problem was not "writing words", in fact he actually recommends medium if that's all you want: "Medium really is a great platform if you just want to write. Unfortunately, for me, that just wasn’t my problem."
It's a syndrome of "blaming the tool". Writing is hard. Not because it's actually hard to physically write words, but because it's hard to stop yourself from thinking your writing is bad. So, naturally we blame our tools when we get frustrated with our writing.
This is the same for website templates, IDEs, to-do lists, etc.
This seems like a good opportunity for me to solicit some advice, if I may:
My writing is bad. Do you have any recommendations for how I could improve?
Better question: Would you mind describing what your own path was like going from "I'm a bad writer" to "Hey, I'm fairly good"?
My lack of writing skill has bothered me quite a lot over the last year or so. I've sent emails to various HNers asking that question, "What did your path from beginner to master look like?" but no one responds. (... Perhaps I didn't write the email very well...) :)
I have a lot I'd like to write about, but expressing myself well turns out to be the hard part for me. If I can figure out how to do that, then I think people will find the topics interesting. But I'm finding it very difficult because I'm a complete beginner. I've never written any long articles/essays/books before.
Thank you for your time!
EDIT: Here's something specific: I'd like to get better at using metaphor. I'm finding that even though I've been writing a lot, I seem to have reached a "plateau" of quality. It's.. well, it's just dull. I don't use many metaphors, and I know my writing comes off as very dry. So I'd like to get better at whatever skill or mindset that lets me spice up my writing, rather than my writing plodding dutifully along its lackluster course without any flair in presentation. Has anyone else found themselves in a similar situation? How'd you overcome it?
Everyone has already told you to practice. Do that. But find someone you respect go give you critical feedback. This is key - we tend not to notice critical shortcomings that outsiders can spot. In fact they remain shortcomings in part because we are blind to them and so never realize there is something to improve.
Paul Graham's essay http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html talks a lot about how he does essays. It is likely to be helpful if you want to write like he does. And if not, it is still interesting.
In a very different light, http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/ has a lot of useful information. Most of it is about presentations, but his suggestion of getting to the point and embellishing is very good. And it is wise to understand what he says about people's ability to pay attention. Long form writing can easily exceed normal human limitations. Presentations and writing are very different mediums, but both hit the same human limits.
And finally be aware that people are not simply "good at writing". There are many different forms of writing, and they are at most correlated skills. For example I became good at answering specific questions in ways that are likely to stimulate further thought due to answering many thousands of them on Perlmonks. However I would not be able to write a decent fiction book to save my life.
Hi. Some excellent suggestions in this thread already. Here are a few more.
1. Read great writing. If you want to write better nonfiction, read the masters of nonfiction. Michael Lewis. Tracy Kidder. Atul Gawande. Joseph Mitchell. Jon Krakauer. Christopher Hitchens. Tom Junod. If you want to write great fiction, read Murakami, Marquez, Palahniuk, Eggers, Hosseni, Oates, Atwood. (Shameless plug here, you can find stories by these folk at Byliner: http://www.byliner.com )
2. Read about writing. Some worthy books on this:
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King (really!)
The Practice of Writing, by David Lodge
The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott
Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd
To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, by Phillip Lopate
3. As already mentioned upthread, practice. Write something every day.
4. If you're not confident in your writing, apply your MVP lessons. Write short sentences. Use as few words as possible. Rid your sentences of adjectives and adverbs. Study your verb choices. Ditch the complex punctuation and dependent clauses. Ask yourself, What's the least amount of "writing" necessary to convey this idea or image?
> On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King (really!)
I can't second this enough. I read it once a year, at least. King's writing nonfiction, he's writing nonfiction about writing, and yet his command of his own literary voice is so strong that you feel like he's sitting on the other side of the table from you. It's an amazing, honest book.
I don't think reading great writing can be stressed enough. It helps you find a tone that you like and can take the pressure off of trying to find 'your own style'.
For a good variety of nonfiction, try longform.org.
If you are able to get interested in a wide range of topics, longform is a treasure trove.
The way you get better at X is to do it. For pretty much all X. Additionally, you can seek feedback, or go back after a while to look at old work with a fresh eye, or find other ways to measure your impact. You can also look at other people's stuff and steal tricks. But basically you just have to do it.
It's definitely true for writing. For a long time my vice of choice was mailing lists. Lately it's Quora, because you get a lot of feedback, and because you know you're writing for someone specific who actually wants to hear what you have to say, and because you get to read other people's takes on the same thing.
But the specifics don't matter. Just keep writing and reading. You'll get there. Just listen to Ira Glass: "Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."
>The way you get better at X is to do it. For pretty much >all X.
A bit off topic, but one of the few X where this does not hold is marriage. Statistically, first marriages are more likely to succeed than any subsequent marriage.
This statistic doesn't seem immediately relevant. Success of marriage (let's say in years before divorce) is heavily influenced by the background of the individual.
Think about getting sent back to the beginning of your marriage, would you be better (with that one)? You would... that's the point.
Not true - you're measuring the wrong thing. The X that is improving with practice is 'Being Married to person P' and statistically, the longer you are married to a particular person, the more likely it is to stay that way. [1]
You are welcome to measure anything you want. I am only reporting the statistics of marriage. First marriages fail about 50% of the time, while second marriages fail in the 70% range. Therefore, people are, on average, worse at their second and subsequent marriages than their first. It is rather irritating to contemplate, but the average person does not get better at staying married with practice, at least for "practicing" marriages with different people.
My point was that there exist skills (or goal oriented behavior, here the presumed goal being to stay married) that do not necessarily improve with "practice." Nothing else comes to mind, but I would be interested in other things that break the common notion of always getting better with "practice." Human beings are very complicated, and I can imagine other situations where practice does not make perfect.
I remember reading some research about divorced people where many reported that they had underestimated the emotional devastation that they felt after the divorce, and that if they had known how hard it would be, they would have tried much harder to rebuild their marriage.
As another off topic comment about how complicated people are, in marketing it is important to let people know that what you are selling is easy and quick and convenient and ... Except for one area, where it is critical to tell people how hard it will be and how much work they will have to do if they buy your product. And that field is body building. Body builders buy products that pitch how hard they will have to work and how much pain they will need to endure. Go figure.
That's an interesting example! Sorry I missed this until now.
I think you might have confused "getting married" with "being married". People who get married several times are probably pretty good at the getting married part. People who stay married, though, probably work hard on the day-to-day experience of being married. In the same way good writers work hard each day on the writing.
EDIT: ProTip - "I've sent emails to various HNers asking that question, "What did your path from beginner to master look like?" but no one responds. (... Perhaps I didn't write the email very well...) :)" Act like a hacker and treat this like A/B testing. Send out more emails and see which tone/message/etc sticks the best. Revise and refine over time!
@sillysaurus I'm not sure if you're a book-reader. I am reading your comment and I am seeing the exact person this book is talking about. If you like to read about non-fiction writing, I suggest "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser.
> My writing is bad. Do you have any recommendations for how I could improve?
Write often. Solicit critique from colleagues who write well. Academic papers with peer review helps. Critique others' writings. Find good role models and analyze their style. Most importantly, have an interesting story to write about, and focus on developing the story.
Story is king, not metaphor. Perhaps try to be more cinematic in your story telling. Build up to a climax, then unwind from there. Try the fork in the road approach where you can contrast your ideas to other ideas, putting them into better context. Also, it helps to be angry at the status quo and be a bit provocative.
You can always make your message better by making it shorter and more concise. Delete anything that is redundant, superfluous, and gratuitous. Prioritize your messages and delete the lowest priorities ones that are not essential.
Finally, dot your eys, cross your tees, and kill your orphans (if using latex).
> Better question: Would you mind describing what your own path was like going from "I'm a bad writer" to "Hey, I'm fairly good"?
My adviser (when I was a PhD student) first beat good writing habits into me. However, I didn't get good at it until I found good role models and was able to become very self critical about my own writing. Even now, I only seem to write well when writing papers that will undergo peer review; format is important. Find the format that you prefer, and optimize your style for it.
> EDIT: Here's something specific: I'd like to get better at using metaphor. I'm finding that even though I've been writing a lot, I seem to have reached a "plateau" of quality. It's.. well, it's just dull. I don't use many metaphors, and I know my writing comes off as very dry. So I'd like to get better at whatever skill or mindset that lets me spice up my writing, rather than my writing plodding dutifully along its lackluster course without any flair in presentation. Has anyone else found themselves in a similar situation? How'd you overcome it?
I am not going to comment on why metaphors are a bad idea. Especially if you want to get into prose. One trick that would work is writing pastiches [1]. Pick up a few writers you admire. Reconstruct material in their style. The same paragraph in several different styles will help. Repeat, re-do. The hardest thing about writing is not writing well. It is about being ok with your writing being utter shit. You have to climb that hill. Maybe write 'n' pages every day or so.
Everyone goes through this. I read Bukowski's Ham on Rye a few weeks back. Loved it. Today, I opened Post Office, his first book (I think). It was utter shit. Read like Hemingway. Yet, over twenty years. The man's prose had changed into something beautiful. Something uniquely Bukowski. You will find your voice.
I don't see how one can string together more than three words without tripping over a metaphor - or at least a close relative. It is literally (not metaphorically) the scaffolding of the mind, the threads with which we weave concepts into understanding. Perhaps you have a very specific notion of metaphor? Maybe the word invokes a vision of sentences stolid and dry, bleached with metaphor to a colorless drab? Something awkward like: 'metaphors make a sentence into a can of coke left out in the sun too long'?
But metaphors are most royal among analogies and they are all we have to describe and understand the world by. Essentially we have a collective metaphor for the universe that undergoes a shift every so often (don't confuse the instrument readout for what you are measuring). Not even physics can escape them: solar system metaphor for atoms, wave-particle metaphor, curved space metaphor, many world metaphor for a deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics. On and on (IMO part of the difficulty of physics is emphasis of metaphor over simile).
Metaphors are powerful because when they get the angle wrong, they have the capacity for a lot of damage. On that we are in agreement. Software is constantly trying to shove (admittedly poor) metaphors down our brains. Programming languages themselves are stuffed with metaphors. Mathematics is made unnecessarily harder from expectations set by adjectives which were once metaphor. Random variables for example are an easy concept that are hard to learn because the brain finds rewriting difficult (bad design 101). Or another: 'What do you mean Complex Analysis is much less pathological than Real Analysis' :S
Metaphors are little programs to bootstrap understanding. Words we write are not just a series of symbols, they are more than mere pixelated shadows of intention. Instead, they are meant to be read such that the receiving brain parses them into hopefully, a similar set of experiences. Experiences which capture the essence of the original intent in full dimensionality, even if not in detail. When we read of an act, the parts of the brain that are involved in the actual act are triggered, an actual honest to goodness simulation. So in a manner of speaking, writers were the first programmers. They had a model of the audience and tried to place words together in just the right way so as to stimulate a certain set of experiences.
When we explain things in metaphor we are trying to share how we experience our understanding, how our deeper more intuitive 'fast brain' works with the concept rather than spitting out an unhelpful series of definitions for the 'slow brain'.
So yeah. My defense of metaphors. Apologies if I went overboard.
> Here's something specific: I'd like to get better at using metaphor.
I don't think you do. Metaphors aren't something that are easy to avoid in writing. Their purpose is to illustrate a concept; if you aren't illustrating a concept, you generally don't need a metaphor. If you are, then you'll be making a metaphor anyways. (Or failing to explain the concept.)
> It's.. well, it's just dull. I don't use many metaphors, and I know my writing comes off as very dry. So I'd like to get better at whatever skill or mindset that lets me spice up my writing, rather than my writing plodding dutifully along its lackluster course without any flair in presentation.
But this is what you seem to be after. This is style, whereas metaphor is just mechanics. You're looking for cadence, tone, color. So, here's my suggestion:
Pick someone in your life who you like listening to. Not for the content of what they say, but the sound of their voice. Give them samples of your writing and have them read it to you. Listen for where they get tripped up or start losing their luster. Those are your problem spots. Ask them what they'd say instead, to achieve the same meaning.
This isn't something I've personally done. I'm egotistical enough to appreciate the sound of my own voice, and I've had a lifetime of drinking in affectations of character dialogue. I've had people tell me how my writing and speaking style changes... and traced it back to the fact that I'd been re-watching Firefly recently and was unconsciously affecting a drawl.
> Metaphors aren't something that are easy to avoid in writing. Their purpose is to illustrate a concept; if you aren't illustrating a concept, you generally don't need a metaphor.
Don't discount metaphors -- they're a critical part of everyday communication because our conceptual system is largely metaphorical. We think in metaphors. They're the concepts we live by. They're the abstractions that help us relate and understand.
If you send an unsolicited email to someone you don't know that begins with a question like "What did your path from beginner to master look like?", you're unlikely to get a response even if you had Shakespeare ghost.
The "master hackers" you are targeting probably haven't carved out time to answer all the random email they receive and their mental mail filter is probably pretty tight.
"What's was your path from beginning to master?" is a big contemplative question. Answering it properly would require someone to pause and reflect over what could be a 20-40+ year journey and then take time to distil it down into an email. That's a lot to ask of someone you don't know
Instead, get a dialogue going with a relevant two or three line email that can be answered quickly and doesn't require someone to write their memoir in response.
One strategy I like is laying out the initial analogy, then exploring it and sprinkling in the details. It helps readers keep track of where a detail is used and how it relates to others. "On Writing Well" is a great book if you're looking for a more formal treatment.
"but no one responds. (... Perhaps I didn't write the email very well...) :)"
I think you would have done a lot better asking just 1 specific, targeted question that could be answered in a sentence. Successful people are generally busy and as much as they want to help others, they generally don't have the time to help everyone.
A focused, short question can open a door and possibly get a dialogue going. In addition, trying to phrase such a question will get you concentrating on what is important to you, which can only help.
"Well, in my case, my writing is bad. Would you happen to have any recommendations for how I could improve?"
Write more. Criticize yourself, but temper that with feedback from people you trust. There's a very high chance that while your writing is not perfect, it's probably not as bad as you think it is. (Note, this also works the other way, if you think this is the most wonderful piece of writing ever committed to bytes, it's probably not as good as you think it is either.)
You write well enough. What's missing is maybe a punch in the guts. I mean in yours. Writers must have wounds to heal, must have a very strong agenda. You must want to kill someone, you must have your heart rotting in some hatred, or you must have this kind of faith only accessible to the mentally ill.
Writing shouldn't be a choice: it's write or die from your wounds.
Right now you're training in the gym, you need a beast on your neck to start running for real.
You can spell. Grammar seems good enough. I can understand what you are trying to say.
How is your writing bad?
BTW. Always amuses me that some of the best selling authors are said by the writing snobs to be bad writers. Funny that. Might be that the writing snobs having got much of a clue.
IMHO, if you are getting your message across, then the writing is good. Maybe not "art", or "excellent", but "good" is often more than good enough.
> I don't use many metaphors, and I know my writing comes off as very dry. So I'd like to get better at whatever skill or mindset that lets me spice up my writing, rather than my writing plodding dutifully along its lackluster course without any flair in presentation.
You realize talking about "writing plodding dutifully along its lackluster course" was a metaphor, right? Writing doesn't really plod down courses, only animate actors do that. And you, the writer, weren't _actually_ plodding down any tracks either (unless you were writing on your iphone while plodding down some course somewhere). METAPHOR, MAN!
Might be a bit of a mixed metaphor when you switch to "flair in presentation."
Oh, and talking about 'spicing up' writing is another metaphor, although maybe a kind of tired trite one.
A couple people I know have had good experiences with http://www.thewritingcodesystem.com. They actually finished writing the novels they were writing for 10+ years.
I personally haven't tried it so I can't vouch for it.
1 - I think (though perhaps I'm putting words in his mouth) jgrahamc's point is that dicking around with sites and tools and blah blah blah is, well, just dicking around and not actually writing;
2 - lots of authors I respect have basically said that the way to get good at writing is to write a lot, revise a lot, and be prepared for early writing to suck. I wish there where a shortcut.
"It's weird to me that people need all these amazing tools to just write stuff."
Agree but have to say that when Pagemaker 1.0 came out on the Mac (might have been 512k) some people that I worked with talked about the creativity that just flowed. I think it was a mania induced by having the ability to see on the page the final product and what it looked like as opposed to just the words which someone else would typeset. (In other words to repeat the "high" created added to the creativity). Was hooked up to a Linotronic for camera ready copy.
I really like the idea of writing in a text editor, and have tried to do so many times in Vim, but for some reason it's very important for me to see the result as it will appear to the reader as I'm writing. I don't know why this is, it just happens. When I'm in a WYSIWYG word processor with the typography mostly figured out, everything goes smoothly.
Likewise, when I write a post on web forums, Facebook, HN, etc., I need to publish it first before I can properly edit. Seeing the post in context is somehow important.
You can very likely wire that up, if you've got a bee in your bonnet to do so.
When I was editing latex files regularly, I had an environment something like
$ make output.pdf
$ xpdf -remote projectname output.pdf & while inotifywait -e modify **/* ; do make output.pdf; xpdf -remote projectname -reload; done
Then any time I changed a figure or a tex file or an embedded screenshot or whatever (any transitive dependency of output.pdf), make would rebuild it and display the result. xpdf nicely does not change the scroll position (even a little bit), so this gave me a rather nice nearly-real-time WYSIWYG view.
My $EDITOR at the time was vim and it never entered my head to try to contrive automatic saving every time I paused typing or something like that, but that seems like a fun idea.
I am the total opposite. Seeing the result as I write feels just annoyingly distracting. The unpredictability of the jump to the next line is what I dislike the most.
Obviously I do look at the final formatting and possibly tweak it, just not at the same time I edit the text.
Obvious disclaimer: I do not think that this is "better", I'm just providing a different data point.
I dunno. I personally like writing on vim or on paper. However, there is a reason I feel more expressive. It is the very nature of these specific tools. I really like vim as much as I really like writing on moleskine. So I understand when people say the medium in which they portray stuff is important for them.
I visited the site; it's really nice but four <br>s between paragraphs in the summary looks pretty strange. Seems like it might be their system because when I click "Continue," the awkward spacing goes away. Anyway, looking forward to reading more.
> Two different parts of the brain conflicting. When I’m writing, I don’t want to be in code mode.
This is one of the reasons why I think static site generators are really in their infancy. He describes Pelican as "Jekyll for Python". This highlights what is wrong. You shouldn't have to decide on a tool based on what language it is written in; you shouldn't need to know what language it is written in.
A static site generator should have a very simple folder structure, something like:
draft/
published/
site/
templates/
That's it. You write markdown files in draft/ and move them to published/ when you're done. The generator runs as a daemon and spits out site/ No config files. No `bundle install` nonsense.
The reason many people care about the language is because of the install method (at least that's been my issue). I don't use Ruby, so when I tried to use Octopress the other day I found myself installing a bunch of packages, then realizing that Debian's Ruby version is slightly too old (1.9.1 instead of 1.9.3), then trying to set up rvm or renv (or whatever), then giving up.
I write a lot of Python, so if it had been Python, I would have had the tools to properly install it, no problem.
This is the general problem with distributing "programs" with systems that are really better suited to distributing "libraries" (like gem, npm, and pip). If I am downloading a library, I must be writing code in the language, so it's no problem to expect me to have a reasonable tool chain set up. But if it's just a program that I'm going to run, I shouldn't have to have a language-specific package manager (let alone a rvm/virtualenv-type system) installed and configured.
Debian (and Ubuntu) actually ships all of 1.9.x as 1.9.1, fwiw. On my Wheezy VPS, "ruby1.9.1" is actually 1.9.3p194, on Ubuntu 12.04.2 it's 1.9.3p0, on Squeeze it's 1.9.2p0. It's some kind of API compatibility thing that probably makes sense to the Debian Ruby packagers, but not necessarily to you or me.
Nah. If you want it to be that simple, then you'd just use a hosted Wordpress. Static site generators are for people who like to tinker. Or at least have the option of tinkering. I use Jekyll because I want to know then when I need to do something different than they expected, I can make it happen without inordinate fucking around.
There's a whole lot of space between hosted Wordpress and hacking on Jekyll. Not that hacking on Jekyll is hard, but there is something to be said for a more portable and easily installable/cross-platform solution. For example if my dad wanted to start blogging I wouldn't want to point him to Wordpress, but there's no way he'll dive into Jekyll.
Sure, but I don't think there are many people to whom "simple" means a command-line interface, or even a local generator whose files you upload somewhere. A hosted solution with a simple edit box is much more in line with most people's notions of simple. I think that's what Medium is going for.
Jekyll is too complicated. First, it requires a .yml config file, which is unused outside of the Ruby community. So this fails my "you shouldn't have to know what language it is written in requirement". Personally I don't think there should be any config files at all, but if you're going to require a minimal one at least pick something universal and easy to understand, like an rc file or maybe json. Secondly it has the weird _ naming thing. Jekyll was clearly made for Ruby developers, which is fine I just think the world needs something much simpler than that.
YAML is okay when used in a simple manner such as for a basic configuration file, but it has a seriously fucked up spec with all kinds of landmines waiting to blow your legs off. If you aren't generating your YAML with @ruby_object.to_yaml then sooner or later something bad will happen to you.
YAML was crafted to be usable by most mere mortals. Whether or not it achieves that in practice is another issue ... but I think most people who find themselves using a static-site generator could find their way around a YAML config file just fine.
Give me a link to one then because I clearly missed it and could use your help.
The 1% of static site generators I've seen are written in scripting languages that require me to install an interpreter and related build tools. Then I'm stuck with their own custom template, markup, and configuration language. And I just don't really care to manage all of that. Even as a highly technical user.
I wrote one myself in the 90s in Perl (and have thankfully lost the source code). They're fun to noodle with if you have the time.
I currently run my site on Pelican (and even patched the WP importer so that it properly preserves WP formatting). It's great but terrible. I still have to keep around a virtualenv. I have to maintain templates that I'll never be able to reuse. It's still not quite good enough. It's a good thing I make my money programming in Python and am familiar with the developer tools.
I'd like something a little more hands-off and with fewer dependencies.
We do our best to make Pelican as user-friendly as we can, but of course there are areas we'd like to improve upon. Community contributions to that end are most welcome. (^_^)
I'm sorry, are you complaining that you have to have python/ruby installed to use programs written in python/ruby, then attributing that "problem" to static site generators?
It has been. Seems most people write one of their own at some point.
I found the OP's suggestion appealing because it sounds like a solution that wouldn't require me to install some interpreter, a bunch of supporting libraries and tools, write my templates in some custom template language, custom configuration language, scripts, yadda, yadda.
It would be nice to have a system that ran as a unix-y daemon or cron job that just took a single dot-file and did everything for you.
This approach wasn't quite good enough for me. Even markdown -- for that matter, anything in a text editor -- still feels like "code mode" to me.
My solution was to make an open-source cms with google docs as the editor. I can manage my site from docblogger.org, use the fantastic google docs editor as my wyswig, and can edit the code to do whatever I want, whenever I want.
Code's at https://bitbucket.org/rattray/acvte/ and the interface is at docblogger.org for anyone interested. Very little activity/use so far, though.
That's basically what I've done with [trofaf][0]. 3 subdirectories:
posts/
public/
templates/
Posts without valid YAML front matter are ignored (drafts, for example), and the few options available are on the command line, no config file. I run it with upstart and it watches the posts/ and templates/ directories for changes, rebuilds as needed. Pretty much the simplest still-useful static site generator I could think of. Fits my needs anyway.
It could be doable possibly with a microframework that's optimized to cache views into a public directory the .htaccess checks first, before passing requests to the framework. Toss in a simple web-based CMS and a frontend for Composer (mumble mumble profit.)
I'm ashamed to admit i've been working on something along these lines off and on for a while but have nothing brilliant to show for my efforts. But the basic idea is entirely possible.
You might want to look at something like Prose (http://prose.io/#about). It aims to provide the convenience of CMS/blogging platforms like Wordpress for static site generators.
The concept of spending your time on writing things that you are obviously very passionate about on someone's else's platform so that guy can make money off of your writing seems so silly to me. Specially among people who are supposedly tech savvy.
Just spend 5 bucks a month and less than 45 minutes of initial setup, you can have your own blog and have 100% control over whatever the hell you want to do.
People who can't do that, should probably use yet-another-blogging-platform like Medium.
Medium is providing a service with the expectation of making money, if a user is a decent writer then there is the potential of further opportunities being presented to the user. Medium (and Wordpress, and other similar platforms) are providing the user with value, it's not entirely one-way.
I'm tech savvy (B.Sc. Artificial Intelligence and Applied Mathematics, Computer Programmer working full-time for 8 years since University) and I choose to use Medium because I don't want to manage my own personal server, or buy domain names, or have recurring expenses, or have to fiddle with configuration files, or hack templates. Simplicity means the world.
Saying that; I agree with you (in that people contributing their data to platforms for the profit of others is silly.) Facebook is something I don't use because I don't see what I can get back from it that I can't already get from text messages or face-to-face interaction. Medium at least offers me something in exchange for contribution.
Your last point is interesting because I feel the exact opposite. Facebook I don't have a problem with because I just post throwaway stuff on their anyway, and all my RL friends so they actually have a better chance of seeing it vs on my blog or twitter or whatever.
But Medium feels like it's taking the part of my online presence that I want to be most unique and commoditize it into this mass website that will only ever make the founders of the site famous. I know that sounds extreme because they do provide you with a great tool and some means of exposure you wouldn't otherwise have, but it just feels so dehumanizing somehow. Like it's taking the very best part of the internet and attempting to privatize for the benefit of some heavy-hitters in the silicon valley old boys network. And I think I put my finger on something with that last bit, because Medium is really kind of the same thing as Tumblr which never bothered me; maybe because it didn't have that patina of tech insider design perfection bestowed upon us in private beta as if from the gods themselves.
I don't know what fiddling with configuration file and maintenance you are talking about. It took me less than 1 hour to setup my wordpress blog on a vps. Other than the occasional plugin and wordpress update, which literally is just a button press away and take 30 seconds, what other server/blog maintenance you have to do?
In the last 3 months, I didn't even log in to my server, it has automatic backup setup and basic security taken care of during initial setup. I spent less than 3 minutes in the last 3 months for occasional plugin updates.
If you are talking about customization, than it is not any different than spending time customization blog on someone else's platform.
If you don't have 3 minutes in 3 months and 1 hour of initial setup time than you have other problems.
Is it so hard to believe that some people just want to share their thoughts with the world and don't care about profit or building their personal brand?
I am not talking about building personal brand, not sure how you came up with that, nor am I talking about profit. Medium and other blogging platforms are content firm, basically you are working for them, under the guise of simplicity and they are (or will be) making money off of your writing.
After a month of struggling between Blogger's brain-dead, non-Markup, stuck-in-2001's editor and contemplating a complete switch to Medium, I also decided to just go with a simpler, static blog (running on a stripped down Pelican). As coincidence would have it, I just decided to put up some random thoughts about this today as well: http://blog.macuyiko.com/post/2013/pelican-switch-follow-up....
The Great Internet Scam: tricking people into taking their time to create content for your web property, thereby increasing the value of your property. We've seen one major application after another go down this same road.
One of the reasons I never started blogged seriously is something like this. It's a very silly reason, I dev alot, I have ideas for blogposts.. but I just never could decide on a platform.
I don't like the idea of a hosted blogplatform, for some of the reasons Kenneth didn't.
I refuse to run Wordpress due to it's security history and upgrade hell. I know, there's security issues with everything.. except for maybe a static site with jekyll or something :). It's just that ages ago I thought that Wordpress was a silver bullet making various sites and I got bitten by it.
I never found a polished ruby/rails blog app. I've searched, maybe not lately. Has this changed?
A static site generator writing blog posts with git never excited me much, I like a kickass RTE.
The idea of doing my own blog comes up now and then but I haven't acted on it yet.
What options are there out there besides PHP? Preferable ruby/sinatra/rails over django.
Words written on a crappy platform always beat words not written on a beautiful one. Don't get too hung up on the question of tools, or you'll spend all your time looking at tools and none of it writing.
> A static site generator writing blog posts with git never excited me much, I like a kickass RTE.
Ironically this is a good description of the original "static site generator", Movable Type: http://www.movabletype.com/
It has a dynamic backend (written in Perl, which some people find a turnoff, but unless you're hacking the software itself I can't imagine why) with a nice RTE available for editing, but in its default configuration all its output is simple easy-to-serve static files.
> I refuse to run Wordpress due to it's security history and upgrade hell.
Your call, but IMO this is pretty short-sighted and reliant on outdated information. WordPress has put a lot of effort into application security and has improved considerably over the last few years. The "upgrade hell" days are essentially over; I've upgraded one blog from early 2.x to the current 3.5.2 release without a single broken plugin.
It's much like another PHP project, phpBB; I'd never have used phpBB2 but phpBB3 is a really pleasant tool.
I think it's good to have a low-overhead method for infrequent writers (people who want to expand beyond their tweet on occasion). Medium seems a good name and place for that.
On the other hand, I can totally see why people who write frequently and think of their corpus as more than an auxiliary to twitter would want more.
There's a good amount of platform distrust with Neocities, too, in that it has the feel of a sandbox and gives off the scent of "may go through some awkward growing pains." But what a great idea. Hope it gains traction.
I agree with the article; I haven't ever been comfortable ceding control of my personal website to a third-party. Inevitably conflicts of interest arise.
The great appeal of Medium is the potential of featured content being re-tweeted by thousands.
And even that is absolutely fleeting. You're probably better off writing it on your own and submitting to Hacker News as the potential reach is much greater.
I love Medium as a guy who used Jekyll for years. It was a huge waste of time. And if I ever spend even 10 more minutes on creating a dummy blog again, I'll ask 10 dudes to beat me with sticks.
> To lazily prevent link-rot, I setup a simple blanket 301 redirect from the old domain to my profile on Medium. Things felt right
That doesn't prevent link rot at all.
301 is a permanent redirect, the old links will end up being replaced and killed one by one, since they all redirect to the same content. And to top it off, now that he's stopped using Medium his profile might simply disappear one day.
is there a blog framework/platform specifically for developers? I want to show code samples with syntax highlighting (and possibly the ability to actually run the sample code)? is there something which lets me embed d3.js charts? i've looked at pelican, jekyll, etc. but i want something simpler.
I thought Medium was a platform which you write for. You don't become Medium platform. They are running it like an editorialized magazine. Your articles are promoted by the platform and not just by yourself. So why not maintain your own blog and write for others as well?
"They are running it like an editorialized magazine."
This is the odd thing about Medium - it's a bit like an editorialized magazine but with no editorial line or identity. If I want to read people writing about academic arts and humanities topics for a non-academic audience, I might go read the London Review of Books; if I want to read extensively researched but also personal essays, I'll read the New Yorker. If I read Medium I get - what? Some stuff written by people on the internet that some other people on the internet thought was good?
I never quite understood the fascination with medium.. it's cool and all, but I'd rather invest in my own "platform" as Marco had put it and control everything with respect to my brand, content and tweak anything and everything to my heart's desire.
One reason for the popularity of WordPress especially the self hosted version, "spaghetti" and all, is that many people have already learned that lesson. It's your content, put it on your domain and do with it what you will. Forget enriching a network.
I can understand why the OP dislikes the homogeneity. But from a reader perspective, I don't mind it at all. There's nothing to distract from the post. It's just one simple battle-tested design. No cover to judge the book by.
The authors sentiments about why he disliked Medium are the exact reasons I've not moved over there yet. My concerns center around building an audience and being able to stay in contact with them. How am I supposed to give away an email course with in post marketing through drip campaigns in Medium? I can't. I cant customize the sidebar to let someone know about a related post that may also have some effect on their life. Just doesn't work. Medium sounds cool but it just feels half baked to me at this point. I dunno ... maybe that will change.
Exactly. Once you get any sort of marketing itch, or design itch (wait until the next set of trends really hit home and Medium is caught out), or IA or UX itch, you are going to wonder how much you could have done on your own by now.
For a lot of people, the allure of Medium isn't the tools or tracking, it's the audience and distribution. If you already have an audience then a place like Medium will do very little for you.
For what it's worth Medium has a really top notch team, and they are still iterating and exploring. This feedback will probably be valuable to them. I have found the Medium UI to be very good.
Is medium trying to compete with wordpress? Maybe the simplicity is its beauty. Not many people care for all the bells and whistles that you can dig into with wordpress.
I agree that if you're thinking about analytics, etc then you've probably outgrown these simple platforms. In this case you should definitely consider running your own install because now it's your business, and not just a journal.
Ugh, that looked good until I got to the bit about using Markdown. I'm not using a vt100 terminal, for gods sake, I can handle an editing system that understands basic formatting.
@kenneth I saw that you are using Midori Traveler's Notebook. I'm just wondering how are you actually use it. I own the regular traveler's notebook myself. But it's still empty right now. I see a lot of people using it as journal, sketch notebook, etc. but I'm not one of those creative type. How are you using it? How do you decide which items go to it vs not. Thanks!
I basically use it as an idea sketchpad for brainstorming. I keep a book of the thin blank pages in it, as well as one squared. The squared goes mostly unused, but it's useful for writing down visual ideas for websites and such.
"I have more than words to organize but want something that manages all that so I don't get distracted coding now my traffic is dying and I'm helpless to stop that and it turns out I changed to a service that only manages words well"
I feel like this could have perhaps done with another draft/iteration to tighten up the goal of the article.
Is there a way to automate your own personal site to update a medium post? I've looked at Medium and while it is visually nice and laid out well, it seems very "cs student who just graduated college and wanted to make a start-up".
This is just a case of choosing something before making sure that it meets all of your requirements. I'm sure that we've all been there in one form or another. I certainly have been, more often than I'd like to admit. ;)
We'll have the same writing experience as Medium, with markdown support, custom domains and an OSS license. You basically post into various forums, which you can moderate.
Maybe. How is the hosting handled by your project? One of the things I'm looking forward to on Ghost is the ability to hack on their dashboard. I'm asking about the hosting as well because I want to have the power to host my blog on my own servers.
There is a constant problem where I mouse over a link and see only medium dot com. It's a contextual stripping in a marketplace that pretty explicitly judges you on the unique ribbons in your hair.
That said, I'd never give my content to a platform like Medium. I happen to like the "writing experience" of Gist, but there's this thing called copy/paste which makes it easy to get the content over to WordPress when I'm done.