Moving on from medium

I used to get very anxious writing on medium. Even though the composition experience is brilliant, the reading experience has deteriorated to chase down a business model. Case in point: Make Medium Readable Again — A browser extension to fix Medium and Ghost - The Independent Alternative to Medium.

My peeves are the distractions from the content; especially the popups and the degraded performance because of JS written to serve unnecessary features. As a product person, I understand the motivation here but the gap between what a user really needs v/s biz imperatives is just too wide.

Hence, I moved to a setup where I write markdown in the Bear Mac app; something I find better than writing on medium. Then copy this markdown into a Hugo based setup hosted on Gitlab pages. I intentionally picked a very minimal theme: Hyde with no javascript since none is needed for what I wish to do. I had to make minor edits to Hyde to improve performance, usability and accessibility. Seems like most of it is working to my satisfaction now so I can safely publish this out.

Need a minor SEO fix (setting this up on my main domain will take ~24-48 hrs) so just have to wait this one out I guess. The accessibility fixes suggested here for contrast feel like overkill and it seems quite hard to balance these suggestions with a decent aesthetic. It’s a topic I’ll dig deeper in and come back to fix.

As a parting note, I absolutely loved Medium when it launched and this particular breakup was hard but inevitable. Thanks folks.

Update (Nov 18, 2019): I finally found time to update the domain and fix the SEO problems. The pagespeed results are much better. The deeper I dug into accessibility literature, I realized that the guidelines are pretty well laid out and the tooling quite helpful (within Chrome as well and tools that help measure the impact of color selection). Hence, made the necessary changes to the typography.