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Tech Blog on Your Site or on Medium / Dev.to?

Antonello Zanini on March 02, 2024

One of the most important aspects to consider before creating a tech blog is where to actually host it. Should you build a custom site on a brand-n...
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Benoit COUETIL πŸ’«

if you are looking to build something unique and want to experiment with managing a new site or target a local community, then you should opt for a new domain.

I respectfully disagree. The time to reach a critical audience while starting as nobody on a new domain is too discouraging. And you can publish in any language on platforms like DEV.

I would say : start on DEV no matter what. If you are at a company with tech blog platform, cross-post there and use canonical URL here to there. If you want to experiment your own platform, do the same, cross-post and use canonical URL here to there.

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Antonello Zanini

That is a viable approach too! Thanks for sharing it!

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Farhan Digital

Yess, that's exactly what I'm planning to do as well. The cross-posting + canonical URL strategy is a sweet middle-ground to achieve the best of both worlds.

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James 'Dante' Midzi

Good article!

Personally, with the changes to Medium I wouldn't pick it as an option. As such, my articles are on my site and are cross posted on Hashnode and Dev.to.

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Antonello Zanini

Thank you! This is the path I chose. I migrated all my technical articles from Medium to Hashnode and Dev.to. I used to be a Medium enthusiast, but the platform has become bad for technical writers. Dev.to, on the other hand, is just great!

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Farhan Digital

I'm not familiar with Medium. Can you elaborate about these "changes" on Medium?

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James 'Dante' Midzi

In essence, Medium started paywalling articles

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Farhan Digital • Edited

That wasn't a thing back then?? I thought the Paywall has always been a feature in Medium. So it's not a big deal for me. But if it's something they've suddenly added, that changes everything. I would be upset too.

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Thiago Massari Guedes

My 2 cents (and that's why I ended up writing my own blog platform Texted2).

External platforms are great and you get lots of features and a community for free (kinda free, sometimes), however, they limit you and moving away from it is not always simple.

What I am doing is writing to a good platform dev.to/thiagomg and writing in my own blog hosted using Texted2.

To reduce the overhead of maintaining 2 platforms, I use Markdown and just copy and paste to dev.to after I am done. All the posts are also hosted in GitLab. With that, if for whatever reason I decided to migrate somewhere else, I won't have scattered content, but all concentrated in my own platform.

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Antonello Zanini

Migrating content is always a problem. It took me a lot to migrate from Medium to WordPress and then to Dev.to. Although you can write a script that does most of the work for you, you still have to manually check each article (more than 100 in my case) and that takes time. Fortunately, I now have everything set up and ready to go.

P.S.
Thank you for mentioning Texted2. I was not familiar with that platform!

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Stephen Collins

Great article.

I personally host my own website (that contains my blog) and also cross post here, Medium.com and hashnode.

Seems to be a common practice!

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Antonello Zanini

Yeah, cross-posting is a popular option. I automated the process with a script, which makes everything easier, otherwise it would take some time.