My story begins on WordPress in 2008. Here's my first-ever blog post. 🙀
I was writing a ton.
In 2013 I left the platform. I realized I wanted more freedom, more customization, markdown, my own template, GitHub pages, all the cool things.
What I didn't realize back then is that probably I couldn't get myself to write.
So I spent 9 years tweaking my GitHub Pages template.
And occasionally writing a blog post, once or twice a year.
Things are different now, probably because of the huge mental decluttering I was doing the past years. Now I have to organize my ideas in Notion, I listen to professional writers, take their courses, and write more.
I didn't set up any crazy expectations for myself, like write two articles a week. Come on, I wrote two articles a year.
So as the desire for more writing and less tweaking grew stronger, things started to get in the way. I started to change minor things as I educated myself on stuff like SEO - thanks to Csaba Kissi. Of course, it was a disaster:
Spoiler alert - I couldn't.
This is when I started looking at the well-known platforms out there:
I wrote an article on each of these - actually just republished one of my original articles from akoskm.com - to experience:
- writing
- reading
- the community
Medium
is a complete trainwreck. Do you know how you get unlimited articles on Medium? You don't sign in. If you're signed in you have more limitations. I have no idea about the community, nobody read my post - maybe it was the tagging, SEO, or I can't write. I haven't read through their TOS but I'm concerned about who owns the content that I write. I didn't like the fact that I don't have backup options. The writing experience was kinda... I like markdown and I think their editor is very limited.
Dev to
is very similar in styling and in writing experience to Hashnode. The only thing that turned me down was basically the custom domain. I might cross-post there, but the winner is:
Hashnode
writing/reading experience is similar but where it really shines is:
Custom domain was a breeze to set up
I entered my custom domain and it generated me exact instructions, provided helpful tips, told me what to expect when I do this:
Ignore that it says the transition could take up to 24 hours because you'll start panicking after 10 minutes. For me, this transition took about 15 minutes.
Markdown import? Of my entire old blog? Huh?
Catalin Pit helped me a ton on Twitter resolving some issues around this, thank you. 🙇♂️
Backups
It's trivial to set up. You need an empty repository on GitHub. When you grant access to the Hashnode plugin you can restrict it to that particular empty repository.
Community
I had a very warm welcome even before posting a thing. Ambassadors reached out to me on Twitter and some of them helped me in DMs.
How the heck this is free?
Yeah, at this point you should be really suspicious so I looked at this also. Hashnode is VC-founded. VC funding is where a business regardless of the profitability of another business - but hoping in future profitability, throws a ton of money at that other business.
Sandeep Panda co-founder talks about this here:
hashnode.com/post/hashnode-is-changing-more..
and here:
hashnode.com/post/what-is-hashnode-teams-re..
Conclusion
If you're like me, wanting to write but always finding other things to tweak on your blog, stop it.
Find a platform that respects your work and makes you write.
If you use this link to sign up I even get a free T-shirt. 🤗
If you'd like to connect & chat I'm available on Twitter.