
Show HN: Switch from Medium to your own blog - mathieudutour
https://github.com/mathieudutour/medium-to-own-blog
======
duiker101
I don't have a blog (medium or anything) so unfortunately I don't have a use
for this, but I LOVED the gif. It wasn't an attempt to show "how easy it is to
do with one command" but rather a real flow of how it all goes, I appreciate
it, well done!

~~~
laacz
The one of many problems with gifs is that you can't pause or rewind them.

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quickthrower2
That problem could easily be solved by browsers though? Treat an animated gif
like an mp4

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jamaicahest
Or just skip the GIF and create an MP4 file? No need to try and shoehorn GIF
into what MP4 can do perfectly well.

~~~
StaringFrog
Yes... except that you can't embed a video in github README

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eugenhotaj
I honestly don't get posts like these. IMHO the main selling point of Medium
is not that you can easily set up a blog, there's plenty of platforms that let
you do that easily, or great tools like OP's for setting up your own. The
point is that there is already a large audience you can reach with your posts,
and Medium actively works to distribute your posts to people who would be
interested in them.

The equivalent here would be a "switch from YouTube to your own video hosting
site in a few minutes." I mean sure, you could, and it probably wouldn't be
that hard, but that's not the point.

~~~
ajkjk
I often feel like the tech industry has a huge blind spot around "not doing
things that make people hate you", and that conversations around tech tend not
to factor "hate" (or 'resentment' if you prefer) into making things appealing.

For example I mostly hate Facebook for the choices they have made for years,
and if I was ever going to stop hating them it would be after many years of
sacrificial demonstration that they have a new philosophy in mind. Not unlike
what it would take for a scumbag person to reverse my opinion of them --
candor and sacrifice, rather than nice words and promises.

It is not entirely impossible to stop being hated. Microsoft is occasionally
managing it with VSCode and TypeScript, although I'd say I still 98% hate
them; they have a lot to make up for, and Windows is still miserable garbage.

It is easy to become hated. Google is pulling it off remarkably. Making money
is often easier if you do things people hate, although it's a short-term view
-- it definitely increases short-term profitability and guarantees that in 20
years everyone will hate you and avoid you. But it's definitely economically
rational for the company's employees, with their 2-10 year tenures and the
metrics they have to hit.

Medium started as a breath of fresh air, and has become hated by being
annoying. The point of switching from Medium is to screw over Medium, benefits
be damned. If you're not factoring resentment into your utility calculation,
of course this action won't make sense.

~~~
bllguo
If you had framed this as being about personal ethics and morals, it would
have been much easier to agree with. Maybe even admirable. Describing it as
some kind of irrational hate just sounds silly.

~~~
ajkjk
Then you and I work differently, and I will stand by my claim that if you/OP
don't factor in 'irrational' hate, you won't understand people's behavior.

Anyway, the underlying principle is one of morals and ethics, in a sense. The
sensations of hate, resentment, or disgust are the outward manifestation of a
calculation to determine who to trust. Naturally, someone who repeatedly
screws you for personal gain should not be trusted. The result is the feeling
of hating them.

But it is not only about raw 'utility'. Someone who does annoying things
(Medium), or demonstrating tremendous hubris or arrogance, or just does things
that are or should be inappropriate, gets resented also. If you send me lots
of unsolicited emails, I can find a way to explain why I hate you in terms of
a utility calculation ("you are taking up space in my attention that I don't
want to give you"), but that's just hand-waving -- I just hate you (to some
mild degree) and I'm working backwards from that.

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blocked_again
Honest question. Do people still read blog posts these days? I feel like
twitter has made me so lazy that I can hardly consume any long content. I
hardly even read the articles posted in HN but do go through the comments
since they are easily digestible. Is it just me?

~~~
ahaferburg
I do from time to time. Depends on the authors ability to make it clear in the
first paragraphs that the post is worth reading.

In case you're worried about having lost the ability to read longer texts:
Find one of those book that you can't put down. A physical book, away from the
screens. I used to read a lot as a kid, then stopped. I'm glad I picked it up
again. But do start with something easy to read.

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Abishek_Muthian
I recently switched my blog from Medium to custom blog, reason being among
other things (such as Policies) it felt slow to load on Medium.

I had a custom domain in Medium before the feature was shutdown for others, so
after I manually copied the posts, I used the same URL slug as in the original
Medium posts and deleted the medium posts. The SEO didn't get affected, same
posts which had most visitors in medium have same number of visitors at my own
host.

Perhaps this was the reason Medium removed the support for custom domains,
those who didn't have it cannot move the posts to new domain and expect same
SEO results.

------
fareesh
Great gif. This should be how everyone does readmes.

~~~
cosmic_quanta
I've tried doing this screen-capture-to-gif thing before but it was always
frustrating. I'd love to hear about the workflow to make a gif like this.

~~~
mathieudutour
I've used the default MacOS screen recording (cmd + shift + 5) and then
edited/speed up some parts with iMovie.

Then I transform the video into a gif using
[https://github.com/mathieudutour/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/mo...](https://github.com/mathieudutour/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/mov-
to-gif)

Hope that helps!

~~~
thomascgalvin
I used to do the same, but I've had MacOS's default software crash with long-
ish (about an hour) content. I switch to Open Broadcaster Software[1] after
that; free and open source, and very well made. The learning curve isn't that
steep, either, if you're just doing regular screen/audio capture.

[1]

------
grx
Why? Sadly, there's not much motivation described in the README. You state
"Let's move your Medium content to your very own website" and then you push it
to Github and Netlify, which are yet another silos. Good work with the export,
but migrating the content to the next vendor lock-in should be optional. Not
to forget that these platforms also collect data about your visitors.

~~~
anchpop
How does Github "collect data about your visitors"? The repository is cloned,
built and served by Netlify's server. And since I doubt Netlify is injecting
any js into my site, I also question the extent to which they can track users.

~~~
dceddia
Netlify is serving the content, so at the very least, they (and/or the CDN
they store the files on) will have a server-side access log of every visitor.
Maybe that's not "tracking" per-se, but, if enough sites are hosted on
Netlify, they could correlate the visits.

As far as I know, Netlify doesn't make this data available to users hosting
sites on the platform.

My own (perhaps paranoid) theory as to why Netlify is able to provide so much
for free is that they're selling the access log data, but I haven't seen any
proof of that either, so who knows.

Another theory is that storing all those access logs would be huge and maybe
they just store nothing...

------
fiveoak
Honestly I really appreciate tools like this exist but I'll probably keep
using Medium out of laziness. I don't want to have to worry about maintaining
my own blog and I'm cheap so I don't really want to pay for hosted
Ghost/Wordpress since I'm not trying to make money off of my infrequent dumb
blog posts. The cheapest Ghost plan is $29/mo :(

~~~
detaro
One of the benefits of static sites like those: They don't need continuous
maintenance like e.g. WP would.

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Vordimous
So I have been putting together a way for people to more easily make their own
blogging platform. It would kind of mimic a social media platform, but since
everything is committed to a repository using the JAMstack it could easily be
converted to a full website or in your case you could simply delete the
repository or any number of your posts because they are just files in your
repository. Any feedback would be wonderful. [https://your-
media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/](https://your-
media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/) Everything is owned by the end
user. This is only providing a recipe for people to use. I will also mention
that [https://www.stackbit.com/](https://www.stackbit.com/) is doing basically
the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers”
perspective.

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artur_makly
..well at the very least it is a form of backup/archiving no?

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proy24
Aaah this reminds me of noob me who thought I could just build a blogging
platform of my own. Here are some non-trivial features that Medium provides to
writers which we just don't notice. 1- Distribution channel No one is gonna
remember the name/url of your blog, Medium allows discovery. 1- Autosave draft
Unless you plan to write your post in one go, in one sitting with an extremely
reliable internet connection, you are gonna need this. 3- Social plugin
integration- Sure start writing oAuth integrations for each of the hundreds of
social plugins out there. .....

~~~
pmlnr
> 1- Distribution channel

Write searchable posts on topics people actually search for. Post it on
Reddit, HN, etc. Those are specifically for distribution.

> 2- Autosave draft

Write it offline, copy paste it for online. Btw WordPress has had this for
10(?) years or something similar.

> 3- Social plugin integration

There are existing solutions for this, see IFTTT, Zapier, etc.

------
welder
Related, I wrote a Python library[1] that takes MD/HTML/TXT as input and gives
you estimated read time for that content. That combined with Flask and you've
got a great blog with read time calculated going forward, while exporting from
Medium looks to only preserve read time for past posts not future ones.

1\.
[https://github.com/alanhamlett/readtime](https://github.com/alanhamlett/readtime)

------
darekkay
What happens with all the comments? Are they migrated as well? It should at
least be mentioned somewhere. Obviously, it is harder to set up dynamic
content (like comments) for static sites. I've blogged about many solutions to
this problem [1].

[1] [https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-
comments/](https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/)

------
outime
The fact that the first thing you see here is a CLI video already puts off
most of the people who write in Medium and could hypothetically consider
moving away.

Since I got downvotes, let me clarify. People who use the terminal can
probably handle an eventual migration without much hassle but it'd be good to
consider non-technical people for future releases. Otherwise it's a fine tool.

------
peter_retief
I have my own blog but also use Medium, I like what they do and wish they
could be better at making money

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cheptsov
Would be also great to see the experience of writing and publishing new posts
and/or updating published posts. Otherwise, kudos for doing this. The GIF is
amazing!

------
sgarrity
Well done. Would love to see a similar process that works for a Medium
Publication (which has multiple authors, etc.).

~~~
mathieudutour
Interesting, do you know if it's possible to export the content of a Medium
publication?

------
danenania
This is fantastic!! I'm going to give it a try before long--thanks for making
it! Also love the gif.

------
indigodaddy
FWIW, the formatting of the example blog referenced in the README looks
stunningly terrible on mobile.

~~~
hustlinhack
There's one issue with the formatting of the tags? Cool your jets.

------
magical_mishka
Smart, catching on the "hate Medium & I'm leaving it" trend

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w_s_l
this is awesome. I ended up paying like $99 USD just to have a custom domain
pointed to it.

When I asked if I could switch the domain they said "that will be another $99
USD please"

...I don't even know why I am writing on medium

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mskvsk
To people wondering why you would want to move to a standalone solution while
Medium provides you with distribution and community - it does not (anymore).
Well, not to the extent that justifies ceding the control over the
representation of your content.

Take a look at this experience [https://www.freecodecamp.org/forum/t/we-just-
moved-off-of-me...](https://www.freecodecamp.org/forum/t/we-just-moved-off-of-
medium-and-onto-freecodecamp-news-heres-how-you-can-use-it/279929)

Tl;dr: Medium's practice of paywalling articles and preferential treatment of
those articles over public ones kills the reach of your content. Also, they
lock you in by removing the feature of attaching your own domain name. Also,
their weird upvote mechanism. Also, the dysfunctional comment system. I can go
on and on.

------
ests
Is there anything similar for swotching from Wordpress.com?

------
andr
I hope that everyone uses this. If I was Netlify, I'd pay Mathieu to develop
this further (e.g. web UI for people not handy with CLI). What broke Medium
for me was their paywall, paid subscriptions, and all that crap. Suddenly,
instead of Medium facilitating an author's work reaching readers, it became an
impediment in its way.

~~~
ohadpr
The CLI version is pretty cool, if you'd like a more point-and-click
experience try:
[https://www.stackbit.com/medium/](https://www.stackbit.com/medium/)
(Disclaimer: we created this a few weeks ago)

It uses the same Medium export process and lets you pick what Site Generator
to use (e.g. Gatsby, Hugo, Jekyll) and more importantly it lets you pick
between a variety of CMS like Contentful, NetlifyCMS, Forestry and DatoCMS.

Oh there are also several Blogging themes to pick with and your new imported
blog can be up and running in 1-2 minutes.

------
phantom_oracle
The cycle of these SV companies is interesting. They start off with a bang and
become "darlings" in the initial stages, then they reach mass-market appeal,
attempt to monetize (some of them do so in the most unethical ways) and start
to become loathed by the very people who touted them in the beginning.

Let's compile a list:

\- Facebook

\- Twitter

\- LinkedIn

\- Quora

\- Medium

(You can add to it to see how far we go)

~~~
mritchie712
Does anyone really loathe LinkedIn? My inbox always has some spam, but it's by
far the best way to get a quick summary of most peoples professional
experience.

~~~
baddox
It took numerous attempts over several years for me to fully close my account
and stop receiving their spam emails. During that time I certainly loathed
them, and now, I rarely think about them at all. Occasionally I’ll click a
link to someone’s LinkedIn profile if they have it set as their website on
Twitter or something. I’ll see the ludicrous login-wall, chuckle to myself,
and close the tab.

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lichenwarp
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