I can't speak for others, but one reason why I'd use something like Medium is precisely to ensure that I don't manage anything by myself except for the content production part.
I have a long list of attempts at setting up my own site, but because it's mine I wanted to get it just right. And so down the rabbit hole I go: making sure my server is super-secure (because it's important hey I'll learn in the process!), finally trying out Caddy, using Ghost (node.js), building my own static site generator using React for the backend, which of course means updating and perfecting my Ultimate Front-End Setup.
And once that's done, I want to do right by the design, and of course make sure my html/css/js is impeccable and that it all runs on every browser under the sun.
Of course I love doing this and I learn a lot from it, but if my goal is to write stuff and put it online, this approach never really works. I'm happy it doesn't, because it means I still love what I do more than writing about what I do, but it's one very legitimate reason to use something like Medium.
I've had largely the same experiences. Recently I decided to challenge myself to instead keep it simple, rather than treat the whole thing as a "learn some new thing along the way" type exercise. The end result is I actually have a blog I'm actually writing on that is absurdly easy to maintain, rather than the usual (for me anyway!) 75 percent complete side project in some new technology I'll never get around to finishing.
Simple VPS, webserver, letsencrypt, static site generator, cloud flare for CDN duties and a little CSS. All I do now is write a new article in Markdown every now and then, then run a simple shell script to regenerate the site and rsync the newly minted static pages to the server.
Personal sites or new blogs are all too often victims of premature optimisation - your amazing google PageSpeed score is nice, but who cares if no one is reading.
That's a hugely popular option for sure, and great for a ton of static site use cases, but you do sacrifice the flexibility of deploying whatever the hell you want on your own VPS. Who knows what I might want to do in the future?
Same. For all the times this is recommended, I haven't found a static blog generator that really works well. WordPress is still the easiest and most flexible to get running, but it's a PITA to keep it maintained.
After trying Lektor (fine for general use, but hard to theme; no pre-baked templating/theming system at all) and Hugo (tbh I don't remember the exact thing here, but I got really frustrated trying to do something and ended up deciding that themeless Lektor was better), I'm now holding out hope that Ghost, while not a SSG, will be good and simple enough that I can self-host a "blog" without falling back to raw HTML editing or WordPress. Started out by having to edit the package dependencies to versions that work on recent versions of Node... :\
Write your own generator, it's pretty easy! Blogs don't have to be fancy, most programming blogs need just paragraphs, images, and code blocks. Then you can add fancier features (interactive diagrams, fancy animations, a nice deployment pipeline, etc.) as you go along.
We developed Strattic to solve the issue of difficult to maintain and optimize WordPress websites. Strattic publishes WordPress websites as static sites, and the origin site sits behind a login so it's only accessible to you. No server issues etc. Strattic is currently in beta: https://strattic.com.
Try Metalsmith if you want to poke around and write code. Try Hugo if you want something that works out of the box but that doesn't have a plugin system.
Honestly no real reason other than it's the one I know and didn't want to spend any more time on finding software to write with instead of spending the time on writing
Heh I can empathise. Two of my biggest reasons for wanting to move to a static site generator are actually to have actual control over the content (in markdown files, and because WordPress and its plugins do a fair bit of processing on the raw content), and because I'm more comfortable hacking in languages that aren't PHP.
That seems to have stopped me from writing though.
> more comfortable hacking in languages that aren't PHP
Oddly enough it was the opposite of that for me. Each of the static site generators I looked at were non-PHP (which is fine but I lack the experience)
I tell you what, if someone ever had a gun to my head and said "make this Ruby software work first time without errors" they might as well just pull the trigger
True, but the free account is trivial to setup, and because entire site is static I can use cloud flare to cache the entire thing. They also have some nice features entirely unrelated to scale ("Always Online" is a good example).
Given the barrier to doing this is virtually non-existent (it's a handful of clicks on the CloudFlare dashboard), seems silly not to take advantage.
Medium is great and you have perfectly legitimate reasons to use it. But if you ever consider setting up your own website and/or blog, look into Jekyll (the site builder) and GitHub Pages for hosting.
I have a long list of attempts at setting up my own site, but because it's mine I wanted to get it just right. And so down the rabbit hole I go: making sure my server is super-secure (because it's important hey I'll learn in the process!), finally trying out Caddy, using Ghost (node.js), building my own static site generator using React for the backend, which of course means updating and perfecting my Ultimate Front-End Setup.
And once that's done, I want to do right by the design, and of course make sure my html/css/js is impeccable and that it all runs on every browser under the sun.
Of course I love doing this and I learn a lot from it, but if my goal is to write stuff and put it online, this approach never really works. I'm happy it doesn't, because it means I still love what I do more than writing about what I do, but it's one very legitimate reason to use something like Medium.