Mark Christian, being 💯% accurate:

Hello! This is my personal web site. It’s not much, but it’s mine. After nearly a decade of just barely existing, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in 2019 trying to breathe new life into it. At this point, I think just about everyone–but especially folks in the software engineering universe–should have a personal web site of their own. Let me tell you why.

This is like Markdown on steroids.

It supports diagrams, calendars, equations, and other features as extensions of Markdown syntax.

Victor Zhou:

Switching away from Disqus reduced my page weight by over 10x and my network requests by over 6x. Disqus is bloated and sells your data - there are much better alternatives out there.

Disqus has been the de facto comment engine used for dev blogging (especially for SSGs) for years. I’m happy to learn there are less bloated and privacy-focused alternatives out there.

Lauren Tan:

I recently moved my blog from Medium to a self-managed blog built with Gatsby in the open, then deployed on Netlify. After a few weeks of fiddling around, I feel like I’ve landed on something I’m mostly happy with.

This is a transition we are 💯 behind. Medium is becoming more reader-hostile all the time. Plus, wouldn’t you rather own your own content on a domain you have control over? Of course you would!

I’m logging this not because it’s super-useful in its current form (it is not). I’m logging this not because it’s a good example of a modern Swift app (it may be, I have no idea). Nope. I’m logging FeedCompass because it represents an idea that deserves more attention.

Independent websites, loosely stitched together via open protocols, are what make the web great.

Yeah, let’s do more of that.

In response to questions about how this change will affect compensation on Medium, Ev says:

It doesn’t affect compensation—assuming you mean for Partner Program. That’s determined by readership from paying members, which will still be counted (assuming they’re logged in). #

In response to questions about the state and future of Medium, Ev says:

Generally it’s 📈. Lots of growth and good stuff happening. I have been meaning to give an update. Thanks for the nudge. #

This tweet from Shannon Ashley states she made $8,069.96 writing on Medium in February 2019 and has the screenshot to prove it. She even wrote “What It’s Like To Be All-In On Medium” but you have to be a paying member to read it.

This post from Dan Abramov about why he moved off Medium summarizes both why we’re no longer linking to Medium and why we’ve never put our content there.

Some of my Medium articles unexpectedly got behind a paywall. I’m not sure what happened and whether that’s still the case. But I didn’t do it myself, and that caused a blow to my confidence in Medium as a platform. I respect their need to monetize, but it felt wrong when done retroactively.

Sam Soffes Jekyll’s a little differently.

This iteration is built on top of Jekyll, a static site generator written in Ruby.

Since I write my posts differently than Jekyll expects, I had to write several plugins to make things work correctly. You might wonder why I don’t just write my posts the way Jekyll wants instead of doing all of this work. I want to keep the details of my blogging engine separate from my content.

I’d love to hear from you about your blogging stack in the discussion below. Like Sam, I’m also using Jekyll hosted on Netlify, but I’m new to his plugins.

Stephanie knows her stuff when it comes to creating developer-focused content. If you’re in devrel (or want your thoughts/opinions to impact your fellow devs), this is a must-read. Don’t make these mistakes!

Ghost fans: bookmark this site for the next time you want a fresh coat of paint for your blog. 🎨

Stephanie Morillo drops some wisdom she gained running the Digital Ocean blog for the past year:

Teams need buy in from the engineering org, a primary owner for all things blog related, a regular publishing cadence, ongoing conversations, flexibility, cross-functional communication, and open dialogue with readers to get the most out of their blog efforts.

Getting buy-in can be the hardest part. I have a hard time convincing myself to blog, let alone other people.

Parker Moore joined the show to talk with Adam about blogging for hackers with Jekyll and GitHub Pages.