Bye Medium, Hello Hugo + GitHub Pages

I’ve officially moved from blogging on Medium to self publishing at https://blog.elijahlopez.ca with the help of Github Pages.

Some of the most frustrating things with Medium are: clunky comment UI, click-bait recommendations, no way to download my own articles, slower than YouTube interface, no dark theme.

The two things Medium does arguably well is being a blogging network and having a writing UI. The writing UI is basically a simpler version of Quill.js, but I can write in Markdown, so the only good point is that the editor is in a Sans-Serif font and not a mono-space font 😂.

A couple weeks ago, I realized that online content is not forever as everybody says. It’s only online content that was archived that lasts forever. Chances are you and I are not going to have our content archived by a third party for free and knowingly available. The best conclusion then is to have at least two backups.

That lead me to first downloading all the files from my Google Drive. Now my Google Drive is almost empty, all my files are available

on my laptop, my PC, and on OneDrive.

When it came to archiving my Medium content, that’s when I realized that there was no option to download, so I had to copy-paste each one of my articles!

Awesome.

I haven’t ported many of the articles over to GitHub pages, mainly because I don’t want to deal with the formatting, but I made this post for another reason. I made this post to inform other programmers that self-hosting is a viable option, and I’ve made it work well.

You can read how I made my own blogging site using Hugo, a static site builder, and hosted by GitHub, here.